


Bootstrapping (Finding A Place In This Crazy World)

by josephina_x



Series: Labyrinth Earth [2]
Category: Smallville
Genre: (none of it any worse than canon), Adopted Sibling Relationship, Altered Mental States, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-11-15 07:14:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/524602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lex and Clark are learning to live in a world without superheroes. Lex actually seems to be having more trouble with that than Clark, but that's ok, because <i>this</i> Lex actually seems open to being rescued by a certain displaced Hero once in awhile... :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. FREEDOM!!!

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Bootstrapping (Finding a Place in this Crazy World)  
> Author: [josephina_x](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com)  
> Fandom: Smallville  
> Pairing: pre-Clex  
> Rating: R (for mindfuckery, PG-ish otherwise)  
> Spoilers: up through Labyrinth, obviously, and a bit farther than that -- through the entire series, in fact; future-fic  
> Word count: 28,600+  
> Summary: Lex and Clark are learning to live in a world without superheroes. Lex actually seems to be having more trouble with that than Clark, but that's ok, because _this_ Lex actually seems open to being rescued by a certain displaced Hero once in awhile... :)  
>  Warnings: Un-beta'd. Middling mindfuckery at one point, but it works out, so no worries!  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.  
> Comments: Yes, please! :)  
> Author's Note: Next in the Labyrinth Earth series following [What Does Not Kill You...](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com/16582.html) \--You should probably read that one first for this one to make much sense.
> 
> ...Yeah, so, I didn't really do enough research before starting this fic series, and there was a plothole. A pretty big one. And then I turned it into a plot point towards the original plot I had planned. It gets addressed here. (Not sure if this means I'm doing it really really wrong, or really really right. but considering that the last time I made any meaningful change to this fic was June 4, I figured I should probably just post it already. ...After an additional round of edits. *sighs and rolls eyes at self*)
> 
> Please note that, unlike some of my other fics, this series is _**not**_ Smallville Season 11 compliant in any way, shape, or form!

~*~*~*~*~*~

"God, Lex, have I told you how much I appreciate you getting me out of here?"

Lex sighed ruefully. "Only about forty-two times since I arrived at your room this morning."

"Well, I do," Clark said firmly. "I really, really do."

"Kal, we both know full well that you can easily leave here anytime you want. It just seems silly for you to have to keep up the pretense, under the circumstances."

"Yeah, I guess. People might have noticed if I disappeared from time-to-time, though, and that would have caused problems. --But you got me out of those daily sessions with Dr. Cohn! I only have to see him once a week now!" Clark enthused brightly, as he followed Lex out the front door of Belle Reeve and over to the handicapped ramp. He took a deep breath and...

"Ahh, **FREEDOM!** " Clark yelled triumphantly, punching at the air with both fists.

Lex simply laughed at Clark's antics, then glanced down and stifled a grimace as the man who was coming up the stairs took the handles at the back of his wheelchair and started wheeling him down the ramp to the awaiting van.

Clark cocked his head at this display, and was even more surprised as he trotted after them and got a good look at the vehicle as they approached it -- a black van, with tinted windows, no less. "No power ramp or anything?"

Lex frowned at Clark quizzically but otherwise didn't respond as he let the man who had wheeled him around scoop him up and manhandle him into the back, before the man folded up the wheelchair and stowed it in the trunk.

Clark had an odd feeling about all this... lack of autonomy as he ducked his head and slid into the back seat beside Lex, watching the Manhandler slide the door shut, then move around front to the driver's side front seat and start the van. Lex hadn't seemed to really put up with anyone wheeling him around at the asylum; had that been a fluke, or was it just Dr. Cohn? Thinking back, Dr. Cohn had been the only one who had tried, and then been summarily and adamantly rebuked; Clark had never made the offer or attempt, nor had anyone else.

"So, um," Clark glanced up at the front and revised his words accordingly, since they weren't alone. "It's not gonna be disruptive for me to be out and about, is it? I mean, if... I... have a 'relapse' -- since, you know, we really don't know what caused this whole huge change in my 'worldview', really -- I don't want there to be any problems." Clark was more than a little worried what might happen if a swapback happened at some random and unforeseen point in the future, given that he had no idea what had caused the reality shift in the first place. He didn't like the idea of the crazy-Clark suddenly popping back here, swapped with him, and running amok or otherwise causing havoc before being locked up again, for everyone's safety.

"There won't be any problems, trust me," Lex said soothingly.

"But, Lex, if I'm out on my own..."

Lex tilted his head inquisitively and gave him a small smile.

"...I'm not going to be out on my own?" Clark hadn't asked what, if any, accommodations Lex had set up for him, but...

"You'll be staying at the mansion with me, of course."

"...Of course," Clark echoed, noncomprehending.

Lex's face fell a little. "You don't want to?"

"No -- I mean, _yes_ , that's... fine?' Clark backpedaled, realizing he'd been misunderstood. "--It's not that I don't want to, I just--" Clark was feeling a little off-balance at the thought of living in the mansion. "Lionel--"

"Lionel doesn't come to the mansion; he stays at the Penthouse in Metropolis," Lex said, giving Clark a curious look.

"He... he does?" Clark blinked. "...Wait, it'll be just me and you? At the mansion? In Smallville?"

Lex nodded.

Clark blinked again, then started to feel somewhat... _better_ about things. "I-- that's..." Clark had to stop and reorder his thoughts; he was going through an emotional roller-coaster right now, and wasn't even really sure _why_. "I'm sorry, it's just a lot to process, Lex." Clark shook his head.

"It is?"

"Well, I mean, I..." Clark glanced at the front of the van again, "I 'remember' the mansion being destroyed. Well, firebombed, to be exact. And my nemesis and I haven't really been on friendly terms in years and years, so..." Clark took a deep breath and let it out. "It's kind of a head trip, I guess." He thought about it a little more. "But, really? Just the two of us?" He straightened as it really started to sink in, then looked down at Lex and grinned. Yeah, he was definitely feeling better about this. Better and better.

Lex gave him a small, tentative smile back.

 _Wow. Me and Lex in the mansion. And no Lionel._ Clark sighed happily at the thought as he sat back in his seat and relaxed.

Then he felt a slight shock and sat bolt upright as something occurred to him. "Oh geez, Lex, what am I going to do for a job?!"

~*~*~*~*~*~


	2. Here Comes the New Lionel, Same As The...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark wasn't horribly thrilled by the time they arrived at the mansion. Lex was of the opinion that Clark didn't need a job, and Clark was freaking out because--

"How am I supposed to help pay the rent?" he ended, finally, exasperated beyond belief.

"Kal, don't be ridiculous, you aren't paying rent!" Lex snapped. "And you don't need a job!"

"Well, then what am I going to _do_ while I'm here?" Clark asked, and watched Lex clench his teeth as he was plunked back down onto his wheelchair again from the van. "And why don't you have any wheelchair ramps at your home?"

"It's a historic site; we don't have permits for those," Lex gritted out. "And you can do whatever you want."

"The mansion isn't handicapped-accessible?!" Clark's brain sort of exploded over that one. How could he have not found a way around that, or otherwise convinced the townfolk that that was a bad idea, or at least doable as an addition without wrecking the general structure of the house? It had been over a decade since--!

Clark shook his head and had to let that one go. It made too little sense to wrap his mind around. "Ok, fine, but what if I want a job?"

"Why in god's name would you _want_ a job?" Lex shot back.

"I don't know! It's just-- I've always done _something_ , even if it was just farm work."

" 'Just' farm work?" Lex muttered laconically under his breath as his assistant unlocked and opened the door for them and he wheeled himself forward.

"I just--" Clark cut himself off, feeling frustrated. "What am I going to do all day?" Clark asked as they moved over the threshold and into the mansion entranceway.

"That's a very good question," Clark heard in an all-too-familiar drawl.

He looked up to see Lionel Luthor standing in the foyer.

_Goddamnit._

Clark frowned while Lex looked shocked before quickly recovering, his hands curling over the treads of his wheels as he glared up at his father.

"What are you doing here, dad?" Lex asked cooly.

"Goodness, can't I check in on my first-born son to see what health he's in without getting the third degree? Really, Lex, I would have thought you'd be pleased to see me after so long."

"Fat chance," Clark muttered under his breath. Lex glared a 'shut up!' glare up at him, while Lionel glanced over at him but hadn't quite caught the words.

"Did you have something to offer, son?" Lionel said lightly, merely a dismissive afterthought as he more-or-less ignored Clark while keeping his attention on Lex.

"... _Excuse_ me?" Clark said, feeling offended.

Then he rocked back on his heels and sucked in a breath as he realized why it had been a given that Clark would be staying with Lex.

_Oh, no. No, no._

God, he'd known it was a possibility, but he hadn't wanted to believe, to even _think_ that--

"So help me _god_ , Lionel," Clark gritted out, clenching his fists and stomping up to him, only barely managing to rein himself in enough to halt right in front of him, right in his face, at the last moment. "If you _ever_ hurt my mother, _I will break you._ "

Lionel looked up into his eyes, and whatever derisive comment he'd been about to make died on his lips.

"I treat Martha with respect," Lionel said in all seriousness. Then, more dismissively, "She lives quite comfortably and well, not that it is any of your business. She gave up any real concern for you long ago, _Kent,_ though some of us do take our family obligations more seriously," he ended flippantly, after treating his name like a curse.

"Kal, for god's sake--!" Lex hissed, and Clark felt a shaking hand on his arm, tugging. He let Lex pull him back -- hell, the last thing he wanted Lex to be afraid of was the possibility of him going on a rampage. He needed to keep himself in better control, for Lex's sake, if no-one else. Lex, after all, knew better than anyone else here on this Earth what he was capable of.

" 'Kal'...?" Lionel queried, glancing between Lex and Clark. "Are you actually falling in with his delusions now?" he aimed at Lex, a slight cruel smile forming on his lips.

"No," Clark interrupted, and gave him a throwaway response: "Everyone involved in my therapy thought I'd like a clean break from all the insanity that 'Clark' brought. It also helps me remember to keep things separate; that things are different now. He's just helping."

Lionel stared at Clark for awhile, then looked down at Lex. "And apparently he speaks for you now, does he?" Lionel said with some amusement, glancing back to Lex. Clark gritted his teeth and stayed silent.

So did Lex.

...That worried Clark more than anything else so far.

"Ah, well," Lionel smiled indulgently. "I suppose Lex thinks that you would do well enough at a job similar to his own, perhaps."

Clark glanced between Lionel and Lex in confusion and then felt the beginnings of panic clenching down inside his chest. "I... I don't really know anything at all about fertilizer plant operations," Clark said warily, feeling suddenly out of his depth.

Lionel gave a surprised barking laugh which startled Clark, and when Clark glanced back to Lex, he saw Lex looking away, his shoulders slumped slightly, and he would not meet Clark's gaze.

"Is _that_ what you thought?" Lionel tendered to Clark, fixing him with a curious look. "Did Lex tell you that he worked at the local LuthorCorp plant?"

Clark's eyes narrowed at the level of mirth and derision Lionel was displaying at Lex's discomfort.

"Ok, maybe I misunderstood, then," Clark told Lionel in an even, patient tone. "What exactly do you do, Lex?" he continued, turning and asking Lex directly.

And Lex... didn't respond. Still wouldn't look at him.

"...Lex?" Clark said, ducking his head down, but Lex continued to avoid his gaze. He was starting to feel more than a little worried.

"He doesn't do anything, Clark," Lionel said slowly, as if explaining to a mentally-deficient child, rolling the words off of his tongue. "He is a drain on society," _just like you,_ his tone implied.

Clark frowned back at Lionel, then looked down at Lex.

"Lex?" he prompted, with about as much response as before.

So Clark squatted down in front of Lex's chair, and tried again. "Lex?"

Lex still wouldn't look at him, turning his head away.

"Lex..." Clark reached out, but Lex shifted away from his touch, and suddenly Clark realized why Lex had gotten so peevish about Clark getting a job.

"Lex, do you want a job? To work someplace outside the mansion?" Clark asked quietly.

Lex glanced down at him and stared.

Lionel just snorted. "He's overqualified due to his education, and underqualified due to everything else."

Clark spared a glare back at Lionel -- he wasn't talking to _him_ \-- then asked, "You've got degrees past your BS in biochem?"

Lex paused, then nodded slightly, almost... shyly.

"Masters and Ph.D in the same, and a MBA alongside it," Lionel tossed out, somehow making it sound as though that were something to be _ashamed_ of. " _And_ an art-history major on the side," he said with equal derision.

"Online classes," Lex offered quietly. "Accredited, but not... not ivy league."

"Well, art is nice," Clark started, not sure how to go about this. "I've always liked your sketches. And I don't know much about biochemistry, but I hear Ph.D's are hard wherever you go."

That got him a startled look from Lex, and then the beginnings of a small, wavering, tentative smile.

It was a start.

"Yeah, I guess it would be pretty hard to choose what you want to do, then," Clark said musingly. "I mean, being able to do anything you want -- that's a lot of possibilities, right?"

Lex looked blank, then nearly agog.

Lionel made more scoffing noises in the background, but Clark wasn't paying attention, and neither, thank god, was Lex -- he was too busy staring at Clark. The shock began to pass and Lex was beginning to look a little blown away at the thought.

At least until Lionel said from over Clark's head, abruptly and suddenly close, "Don't be ridiculous, how would he even get to work?"

 _What, besides getting himself a handicapped-accessible van with the steering and pedals redone so that he could drive himself?_ ...But maybe they didn't have those here? "Billionaire, right? Why couldn't he telecommute, or shuttle people _here_ or, heck, build his own business building next door?"

"Millionaire," Lex corrected him in a murmur, blushing a very light pink. "Not sure I could afford something like that, Clark."

"So you start with a small business. House-sized. It wouldn't have to be a huge factory. You could do biochem research, um, R-and-D, in a smaller lab, if not the big manufacture-y stuff, right?"

Lex looked down at him thoughtfully.

"I sent him to Smallville for a reason, Clark," Lionel said snidely.

"Yeah, to run the plant. Which he could do just fine if you let him," _but you won't, because he'd be good at it._

Lionel glared down at him for a moment.

"He needed the recuperation time after his--" Lionel bit off 'accident', because they all knew it really hadn't been an accident at all. "I told him to take the time off until he was ready. He still isn't ready," he said, all-paternal concern... and fake as hell.

"You're holding him back on purpose," Clark accused.

"I think I know what's best for my children," Lionel said primly, trying to include Clark in that statement.

"Yeah, because Lucas and Lutessa are just _thriving_ under your tender, loving care," Clark shot back with an eyeroll, tired of the hypocrisy.

Lex tilted his head to frown at Clark sideways. His father was speechless for a moment, then:

"What did you say?" gasped Lionel.

"...Clark?" Lex asked tentatively, glancing between Lionel and Clark, confused by Lionel's reaction.

"It's nothing Lex, just an adoption thing," he said, catching Lionel's penetrating gaze and meeting it.

They stared each other down for awhile before Lionel blinked and broke it.

"What sort of game are you playing, Lex?" Lionel asked in a hush, looking suddenly on-alert, but seeming not to dare tear his gaze away from Clark as he said it.

"He's not. Leave him out of this," Clark said roughly.

"Oh, so you wish to place _yourself_ on the playing field as a Luthor, now, do you?" Lionel smiled slowly, sounding amused, with a hungry cold glint in his eyes, as an old lion to a young challenger.

"No. I don't 'play'." Clark glared up at Lionel. "Life isn't a game, and I don't like your brand of 'rules' one bit."

"...What do you want?" Lionel finally asked, curious and watching Clark carefully.

"I want you to leave us alone," Clark said. "Leave me and Lex out of whatever you're doing, like before."

Lionel looked the two of them over. "And if I don't?" he challenged with a smirk.

Clark stood up abruptly.

"Kal--" Lex hissed, grabbing his arm.

"Then a certain tenement building in Suicide Slums gets a revisit from the police, and you get to worry about two newly-found come-of-age players messing around with the internal workings of LuthorCorp, among other things." And then Clark took a deep breath, because god help him if the last one was completely off-base, but... "Like us looking up Virgil and seeing if we can't get to the _truth_ of a few matters." Because if Dr. Swann was here -- no reason to think he wasn't -- and if Clark knew anything about secret societies at all... Even if there weren't Kryptonians and aliens to worry about here.... well, they'd probably still found something just as off-the-wall to have Veritas be about. Crazy old rich guys.

From the intake of breath that Lionel sucked in, Clark knew he must've hit the mark somewhat well.

"I... see."

Clark just shrugged noncommittally while Lex stared.

Lionel stared at Clark for a long time. Finally, he took in a breath and--

"Good day to you both then." He turned on his heel and stalked away. "I hope you know what you're doing, Lex," he called over his shoulder. "You've got a real tiger by the tail here."

The front door slammed shut with a thunderous slam.

Lex waited until the echoes had died away, then said, "That... was a really bad idea."

"Sorry."

"Now he's going to be 'interested' in you." Lex paused, frustrated, then added, "God, what the hell was all that, anyway? You were-- He'll see you as a _threat!_ "

"Sorry."

" _What were you thinking?!_ "

"Sorry."

"Kal--!"

"I'm sorry, but he pissed me off, ok?" Clark turned and paced away, running his hands through his hair. "Did you really want him barging in here every other day? 'Checking up' on us?"

"No, of course not! But--!"

"Then stop, ok? Just stop."

Lex fell silent, but it was a glowering sort of silence.

_Damnit._

"I'm really screwing everything up first-try, aren't I?" Clark groaned, sitting down at the base of the steps to the second level. "I'm making a mess of things with you all over again."

"You've gone up against my father before?" Lex asked with great disbelief.

"Well... Not like _that_ , no," Clark admitted.

"No kidding, I never would have guessed!" Lex spat out sourly.

Clark winced.

"Christ, you're on his radar now. Fuck." Lex ran a hand over the top of his head and looked nervous as hell. "I can't protect you from him, Kal."

"That's ok. You don't have to."

Lex started to protest... and then his mouth hung open.

His mouth worked soundlessly for awhile as a great number of expressions crossed his face, and then his eyes got wide. He shut his mouth with a snap as he stared at Clark.

"Oh..." he said quietly after awhile.

Clark smiled.

"Well..." Lex let out a long breath. "Well, _damn._ "

And then Lex started to smile.

Clark grinned right back. And then he laughed.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	3. Storytime!

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark was a little blown away when Lex showed him his rooms -- room _s_ , plural! -- directly across the hallway from Lex's own.

"Lex..." He turned in place, looking at everything.

Lex just sighed as he wheeled himself in but stayed by the door. "It's really not well-appointed, but when the release approval went through I was given such short notice..."

Clark turned and stared at him. "You're kidding, right?"

Lex looked uncomfortable.

Clark winced a little to himself, then walked over and squatted down in front of Lex. "Lex, it's got a huge bed, a dresser, and a desk way better than anything I've ever owned, and --my old bedroom on the farm? Would totally fit inside that room," Clark ended, gesturing at the closet. "It is _extremely_ 'well-appointed'."

"Clark, that's just a closet, not a room," Lex winced.

"It's a room if you can walk into it and close the door without bending over or hitting your head," Clark said in a no-nonsense tone. "And you're not even letting me pay rent."

Lex tried to cover another wince. "It's subpar though. Give me a day or two to have things replaced. I can do better."

"Lex, if you did any better, I'd be too worried about accidentally breaking things to actually use them."

"You accidentally break things?"

Clark grimaced and looked away. "Well, not usually. Not anymore. My control didn't used to be so great when I was younger. Growth spurts, you know? And I didn't have much of a sense of touch back then; I only figured out how to concentrate and change my touch-sensitivity really recently. And when you've got super-strength and can't feel what you're grasping, only see it..." Clark shrugged and trailed off.

"Oh." Lex thought about that a bit. "That must have... sucked."

Clark laughed at Lex's word choice and nodded. "I did get pretty good at repairing wood furniture. But not being all that sensitive to tactile pressure is kind of a plus when you're being shot with bullets. So, upside."

Lex's lips twitched upwards in a quirky grin and he looked at Clark sideways. "So... no nice things for you, then?" he teased.

"Not when I'm not paying rent," Clark teased right back, pushing off his knees as he stood back up. He returned the grin.

Lex sighed good-naturedly and ran a hand over his head. "Are you always this hard to give gifts to?"

Clark twitched and looked away guiltily.

Lex just looked up at him with undisguised interest. "Your... nemesis gave you nice things when you were friends?"

"Uh, well, he tried to sometimes, but I generally had to give them back if they were too much."

"You... had to give them back?"

"I'd just started high-school when we first met, and we weren't friends for very long after I hit college-age. I did what my parents told me to do," Clark shrugged. "He never tried to give me a _room_ before, though," Clark said, sitting down on the bed and sighing as he looked around. "Truck, yes. Room? No."

After all, Clark was pretty sure The Room didn't count -- it had been _about_ him, not _for_ him, not to mention disturbing as hell.

Lex looked at him askance. "He tried to give you a truck?" he asked as he slowly wheeled over.

Clark nodded.

"Why?"

"Well, he-- uh..." Clark trailed off as he remembered the why of it. When Lex gave him a long look, he ducked his head and said, "It has to do with what happened when we first... met."

"Why? What happened--" Then Lex blinked and seemed to get it. And then he looked a little angry. "You still won't tell me." It was less a question than a statement of annoyance.

"I don't want you getting upset."

"I'm not a child, Kal!" Lex spat back. "And if I want to get upset? --I'll get upset." He narrowed his eyes in a perfectly serviceable glare and crossed his arms, waiting somewhat impatiently.

Clark tilted his head at this display of ire, and couldn't help but smile a little.

"What?" Lex asked peevishly.

"I just... L-- my nemesis, he never really lost his temper with me like you do. Are. Over not explaining things, I mean. When we first met. I... think he was a lot more patient with me, I guess?"

"Really? How did that work out for him?" Lex all-but-sneered.

"Poorly."

Lex, caught up short, stared at him a little.

"I was a teenager, ok?" Clark said in exasperation, pulling his knees up to his chest cross-legged and not feeling comfortable enough with the subject matter to relax even a little after getting himself situated on the mattress. "And I wasn't a very good friend, either."

"No?" Lex asked without inflection.

Clark wasn't feeling real happy by this point. These generally weren't things he even liked thinking about, let alone talked about with anyone. "Look, you know all that stuff Dr. Cohn has me talking about? It pretty much all happened or stems from stuff that happened during high school. I had a lot of crap going on back then, and I couldn't talk to him about any of it." Let alone anyone else. There was only so much he'd felt comfortable telling Pete, after. And, well, after he'd moved away...

"Why not?" Lex asked, though it was more of a quiet demand.

"I was scared, I guess. My parents had always told me never to tell anyone -- that other people wouldn't understand, that I couldn't trust them not to try and take advantage or not to tell -- and I worried what he would think of me." Especially if Lex had been scared of him, rejected him. Clark knew it would've broken him back then, if that had happened.

"I worried what would happen if I went against my parents -- I mean, I'm adopted and they've always, _always_ told me never to let anyone know. It was like rule number one at home. I was scared enough at what might happen if somebody found out. We never really talked about what might happen if I _told_. And I was pretty sure that we wouldn't be friends anymore if I told him, because I'd already lied a lot by the time it got to the point that..." Clark grimaced, stopped, then started again. "Maybe he would've forgiven me, but I didn't know whether he would or not," _and having some sort of friendship with him, however broken, was better than nothing,_ Clark admitted, if only to himself. "And even if he didn't tell anyone else, back then Lionel was always there, too, lurking and looking over his shoulder. It... it wasn't that I didn't want to tell Lex, it was more that--"

"--you worried about what would happen to him if you did. Like Penelope and Devilicus, when it came to Warrior Angel."

"I guess," Clark said, frowning. "I didn't really read comic books back then."

"But you really never stopped to think about what good could come from sharing your secret with people?"

"What good could possibly come out of it?" Clark asked, frowning.

Lex's head shot up at that. "You don't--?" He frowned. "You told me, and that's worked out pretty well."

"I... guess." Nothing really bad had happened so far, yet. But it didn't really count, did it? Not when this Lex had already sort-of known.

"You _guess?_ "

Clark winced, then shrugged noncommittally. He really didn't want to get into explaining all the ways things could go wrong, and scare the already-wheelchair-bound man.

"But you... Ok, look, you're a superhero back home, aren't you?"

"A Hero, not a superhero, Lex. Superheroes are only in comic books." Clark frowned a little more.

"But you have superpowers--"

"Not all Heroes do."

Lex's eyes widened. "They don't?"

"No. A lot of them are human-normal, with really good reflexes at best."

"Then how do they--?"

"Training. Tools. Specialized equipment. Bulletproof vests. They do a lot of preparation, and they always go in groups of two, or at least one primary and one on-call nearby, even if it looks like it might not be anything more than a few hoodlums with weapons. If it's a metahuman criminal or something larger or worse, then they put together a larger team and a game plan, with someone coordinating everyone's efforts from a centralized location."

Lex looked flabbergasted.

Clark guessed that they didn't have Heroes or Vigilantes here simply because they didn't have the requisite metahuman or meteor-infected criminals, or world-conquering or otherwise homicidal aliens that would necessitate someone stepping up to do just that.

Not that that explained a lack of Green Arrow tossing about, but maybe there hadn't been an Order of Dark Archers or whatever they called themselves that had trained his mentor, and then him, up to snuff, because of a similar sort of lack of reason for them to form the group, as well? After all, a 'good hunter' needed a 'worthy prey' to pursue to push himself that far, right?

"...Well, getting back to point, people back home know me as 'Superman', not _me_. What you're talking about -- it'd be like..." Clark dug about for a common reference that this Lex might understand. "--like Warrior Angel unmasking to someone. And there weren't a lot of Penelope's, right?"

"No, but that's just a comic book, not real life."

"Right. Real life is a lot more dangerous, and you can't just rewrite the ending whenever something goes horribly wrong." Not without consequences and things ending up worse, anyway. Time-travel _sucked_.

"...And I take it you don't have any trusted sidekicks, or anything?"

Clark snorted and shook his head. "Ok, not really. There was sort of a running joke for awhile that Chloe was our sidekick, but she really wasn't. She was Hero support -- Watchtower -- our coordinator -- and that's a _really_ hard job to do right. And..." Clark tried to think of a way to put this so Lex could understand. "And besides, could you really see some other version of yourself as being ok with being 'just' a sidekick?"

Lex still looked like he was chewing a lemon.

Clark had a sudden strange feeling that maybe _this_ Lex wouldn't mind being a sidekick at all.

It made him a little angry, because Lex shouldn't sell himself short. Not in any reality. It was just... wrong.

Finally, Lex said: "So, are you going to tell me what happened, or not?" And then he went back to glaring.

Clark was about to testily tell him off, but... really, what was the worst that could happen if he did tell? He'd get kicked out? Lex would have a flaming row hearing about how the accident could have gone? If he was going to do either, it would probably be better to know now than later, anyway.

So Clark chewed over the idea for awhile longer, and couldn't think of anything else potentially worse really. So he sighed heavily and gave in, the anger deflating just as easily as it had built up.

"Fine, fine, but if you get really mad at me, I reserve the right to fly away screaming."

Lex snickered.

"You laugh, but I'm serious."

"Fine, then. Proceed," Lex said imperially, with a wave of his hand, before settling in and grinning like a little kid about to hear a bedtime story.

Clark bit his lip and fought the urge to start with 'once upon a time...'

"I had just started my freshman year of high school, and I was walking back home from school. I was feeling a little lousy, so I stopped on this bridge -- Loeb Bridge -- and was staring down over the rail at the water. A truck drove by, and a big bale of wire fell off, but I wasn't paying attention, and when Lex drove up... he didn't see it in the road until it was too late -- I'm not sure why -- and he hit it and--"

"Why didn't you move it?" Lex interrupted.

"What?" Clark asked, nonplussed.

"Why didn't you move the bale of wire?"

"Because I wasn't paying attention," Clark repeated. At Lex's look, he added, "I was fourteen, and miserable, and engrossed in being fourteen and miserable, ok?"

"Fine," Lex said, sounding grouchy, as though him objecting could have made Clark change what had happened, somehow. Clark mentally rolled his eyes.

He waited for a bit, and when Lex didn't continue to object, he proceeded with his recounting of events. "So, like I was saying, Lex hit the bale of wire. He had been going too fast and he hit the brakes and I'm pretty sure he swerved to try and miss it, but it was across both lanes of traffic -- he hit it anyway -- and it was about that point I finally noticed all the noise and commotion and looked up." Clark swallowed, then continued, his eyes distant as he remembered. "He tried to miss me, but it was pretty clear he had no control of the car anymore. Our eyes met for a split second, and then he hit me." Clark closed his eyes. "We both collided with the rail, and we both went over into the water."

"And you got him out," Lex said in an almost reverential tone.

Clark nodded, almost to himself. "I was underwater, and I was disoriented at first, and then I saw his car. He wasn't moving. I tried to get the door open, but..." Clark shook his head. "I panicked, ripped off the top of the car and got his seatbelt undone, then pulled him out. When I got him onto the riverbank, I realized he was dead."

Silence.

"He wasn't breathing, and he had no heartbeat. So I did CPR, and I was really, really worried that I was doing it wrong -- too hard, or not hard enough. But then he sputtered and coughed up a lot of water, and looked up at me."

A quiet, relieved exhalation of breath.

"His first words to me were, 'I could've sworn I hit you.' "

"And my first words to him were, 'If you had, I'd be dead.' "

Clark opened his eyes.

"And that was when I realized that I should have been dead. But I wasn't. I didn't even have a scratch on me."

"And... and then," Clark swallowed, feeling a little hysterical. "Then he... he just _looked_ at me and... he was worried about me..." _because I was in shock and freaking out._ "He reached out, like he was asking if I was all right." Clark laughed a little. "If _I_ was all right. After all that had just happened to _him_. And... he meant it. And I didn't know what to say." _I was freaking out, and he'd just been **dead** , but he still..._

The look on Lex's face was... confused.

"But you're Kryptonian. You know you're invulnerable."

"I know _now_ ; I _didn't_ then." Clark looked up at the ceiling. "Hell, I didn't even know I was an _alien_ back then, let alone what kind. I didn't even know aliens existed. Dad told me later, after he said I was normal and I yelled at him and shoved my arm in the chipper-shredder, and I broke it on my skin showing him exactly how invulnerable I was. I was completely freaked out about the accident."

Lex looked like he was trying to work out an equation in his head, and it kept spitting out nonsense numbers as results. "You didn't know? How could you not know?"

And that just irritated Clark in the extreme. "How was I supposed to know, Lex?" he shot back, annoyed. "I look human. I didn't know about the spaceship in the storm cellar, because they kept it hidden under a tarp and we almost never went down there. I didn't know I was invulnerable, or close to it, because I'd never gotten caught up in a situation like that before. All I knew was that I was strong and fast."

"And that didn't seem... off to you?"

"Of course it did! But my parents had always said that they never knew anything about my adopted parents, and when I looked things up to try and figure things out, I thought that my birth mother must've been on drugs or something when she got pregnant. That... that I had myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy or something? Maybe with lots of adrenaline always-on, along with that? That would explain most of the strength anyway, and the high metabolism -- I eat a lot of food, about three times what most guys my size need. The speed, though..." Clark sighed. "Maybe not the speed, but I really didn't think about it all that much."

"Why not?"

Clark bit his lip and tried to think of how to explain. "It was... fun. I liked running. Once I got the speed thing down when I was little, I never really had trouble with it. I looked at the times clocked for Olympic sprinters, thought that was cool, and then didn't think anything of it after that, even when I got faster. But... I never really pushed my top speed all that much until later. After." He paused. "I guess... it felt more natural. Kind of right. My strength always caused problems. My speed nearly never did."

Lex shifted in his chair. "So, what did you think you were, if not alien? One of Chloe's meteor freaks?"

"No, I didn't know about them until after the accident, either. I just thought I was human. A weird freaky human, but human."

Lex sat there quietly for awhile.

"Did you tell Dr. Cohn this?" he finally asked, almost tentatively.

"Christ, no -- he'd probably have a field day with it!" Clark huffed, falling backwards on the bed and staring up at the ceiling, letting his legs slip down to hang off the side of the bed to the floor. "I'd never hear the end of it."

"What did your nemesis say about it?"

Clark levered himself onto his elbows and stared at Lex. "About what?"

"About your invulnerability."

"He didn't. Not really. I mean," Clark rubbed the back of his neck, "He researched me a bit, and he even had simulations done up of the car crash and the dents on the front and how I ripped the roof, but..." Clark shook his head. "He didn't really remember the crash very well after everything, and there were times that I got hurt after that. I'm pretty sure he thought he must've been wrong. Sometimes he pushed a bit when I did something iffy trying to stop a meteor-infected person, or get him out of whatever trouble he was in, but mostly he asked things obliquely, _if_ he asked, and he usually didn't ask more than once, or push too hard." _Usually._ Clark grimaced. "I lied. A lot."

"You lied to him a lot."

Clark nodded and sighed, hanging his head. "Really badly. I'm pretty sure he knew when I was. But... he let it go anyway."

Lex was silent for awhile. "He never asked outright?"

"Well, yes, sometimes. Not often. But whenever he did, I was usually depowered at the time. Or under the influence of meteor rock -- green Kryptonite." Clark made a face, feeling almost embarrassed. "I swear he had the worst timing!" He shook his head. "But it's not like he knew hardly any more about Kryptonians than I did back then, to know that green-K could have been the cause. I didn't even know about the meteor rock myself until later."

Lex frowned again. "How often did you get him out of trouble?"

"Pretty often. Most of it really wasn't his fault, though. He did tend to end up in more trouble than Chloe and Lana combined, but... well, a lot of that was Lionel-induced -- his dad's enemies thinking they could get even with Lionel through hurting him." Not that Lionel would have cared, the bastard.

"It sounds pretty one-sided, all that saving-him business," Lex snorted, leaning back.

"Well, he saved me back sometimes, too."

Lex blinked at that and straightened. "He did?"

Clark nodded and smiled a little bit. "After the bridge, he actually saved me later the very next day."

"He did?" Lex leaned forward a little.

"Yeah. Lana's boyfriend at the time -- Whitney -- was a really jealous guy. He was on the football team, star quarterback, the whole nine, you know? He didn't like the way I looked at her sometimes -- I kind of had a crush on her. And the football team had this tradition for Homecoming -- the first home game of the season every year. They'd take some freshman, strip them to their boxers, and tie them up on a cross with rope out in the middle of Riley Field like a human scarecrow until the end of the game. For 'luck'." Clark grimaced. "Guess who got picked that year?"

"You let them pick you?" Lex said approvingly, and with no little respect.

Clark sighed. "I didn't exactly have a choice. Whitney and a bunch of his friends ambushed me on the parking lot at school. And Whitney had a meteor-rock necklace that he'd borrowed from Lana for more good luck. I collapsed practically before the first punch. When he saw me noticing it, he put it around my neck."

"But... that meteor rock, that Kryptonite, I thought..."

"It doesn't just short out my powers and weaken me a little, Lex -- enough exposure to it and I can die."

Lex's eyebrows went up. "Clark never made it out to be that bad."

"Well, maybe your Clark isn't enough of a masochist to imagine how bad it really can be, because it's pretty awful stuff all around."

Lex gave him a curious look, but didn't comment further.

"Yeah, so, there I am, strung up in the middle of Riley Field for hours and hours, and it's night now and nobody came to get me down after the game. I'm shivering in my boxers and feeling like I'm dying, thinking there's no way I'm gonna make it through the night, that I'll freeze out there if I don't die from the pain in my chest first, and I hear somebody. So I call for help a little louder, and it was Lex." Clark sighed. "He had a flashlight, and said he'd thought he'd heard something" -- _heard **me**_ \-- "and... I don't really know why or how he drove by that field at that exact moment, but I'm just glad he did." Clark shook his head. "He got me down and tried to help, but..."

Clark rubbed he back of his neck. This was where it started getting complicated. "But the really crazy thing was, during the meteor shower? Lex had been in that field, and it had been Homecoming, and he'd run across the Scarecrow from back then, too. So... he'd seen it all before." Clark paused, trying to rearrange everything in his head.

"The guy from back then got mutated in the meteor shower, actually. He'd been in a coma, hadn't aged at all, and had this... electricity thing he could do. He'd shown up before Lex did, but didn't let me down. He just went off again and left me there, saying he was going to kill everyone at the Homecoming Dance in revenge since they hadn't stopped doing the Scarecrow thing, and said I was safer where I was. Lex told me later that he'd gotten a good look at the guy as he ran off and recognized him from before, and that was why he had stopped the car."

Clark shook his head again -- it was getting all muddled up. "But, yeah, when Lex got me down, the necklace fell off, and I felt better -- didn't really know why at the time, just that I did -- so I just grabbed my clothes and ran for the school; had to leave him there without an explanation."

"You never talked about it after?"

"We did, a little, the next day. He wanted to make sure I was ok. I didn't want anyone to find out that I'd been the Scarecrow that year, and he didn't push me into changing my mind, and he didn't tell anyone himself when I asked him not to."

"So, you _did_ trust him with some secrets, then," Lex interrupted, watching him closely.

Clark blinked and had to stop for a moment to think that one through.

"I... guess so, yeah." He stopped for a moment, feeling a little... warm? He wasn't exactly sure. "And I don't think he ever told anyone, actually. I know I didn't. But... well." Clark frowned. "It's not like other people didn't know it, too -- the football guys who jumped me did. I mean, it wasn't like it was a huge secret or anything. Not like the alien secret. It was just..."

"--Did you trust him with other secrets like the Scarecrow one, though?"

"Well, sure!" Clark said, feeling a little surprised at Lex's questions and not sure what he was getting at. "We were friends. --Or at least, we were _trying_ to be, back then."

"Hm," Lex said approvingly.

Clark didn't really get what the big deal was or anything, so he just shrugged it off and continued.

"Well, anyway, we got to talking about other stuff, and it turned out that he'd noticed Lana's necklace at the field before he left. He gave it back to me in a lead box. I actually figured out that the stuff hurt me from that, actually. Lead blocks it, but when he had the lid open at a distance I felt sick, and when he closed it I felt fine again. Later, when I tried reopening the lid a little with nobody else around..." Clark sighed again.

"That necklace, I took and left on the doorknob to Lana's house. I _almost_ did what he suggested -- giving it to her directly and narcing on Whitney -- but... I don't know, it didn't feel right, and I didn't want her pity, or anybody else knowing." Clark paused. "Not to mention that Whitney would've made my life a living hell at school if I had," Clark ended with a grimace.

At Lex's raised eyebrows, he explained. "I was pretty much a social outcast at school, and even a little still during senior year when I joined the football team against my dad's judgment. I, uh, I got my mom to sign the permission slip," he confessed, blushing slightly. "He didn't want me playing because he thought I'd hurt somebody -- that I'd screw up and not control my powers properly."

"But, yeah, kind of beside the point. Lex sent me the gift-truck as a thank you for saving his life the morning after the bridge accident, I gave it back after I got home from school the same day because my dad told me to, Lex saved me later that night, and he gave me the necklace in the box the day after that. So," Clark shrugged, "kind of messed up, huh?" he smiled ruefully.

"I... suppose so, in a way." Lex paused. "Did you end up stopping the... previous Scarecrow?"

Clark nodded. "Everybody was ok. Well, except him, sort of. He ended up with amnesia and no more electric powers, after I grounded him out with water. Which was kind of good and a big relief, because he didn't remember me doing anything."

"Huh."

"I missed the Homecoming Dance, though."

Lex looked at him oddly.

"Fourteen, Lex. And Lana had said she'd save me a dance. It was a big deal for me at the time."

Lex shook his head. "Good to know you had your priorities straight -- getting the girl versus stopping a murderous Scarecrow. Sounds like it was a difficult decision," he said with an odd mixture of amusement and sarcasm.

"Yup!" Clark said brightly, and laughed when Lex smacked him lightly on the knee.

"But... you're really all right? I mean, you were?" Lex asked, looking at him searchingly.

Clark pushed himself upright and nodded.

"Well, there's that, at least."

Clark gave him a half-smile. "Yeah, I guess."

Lex mused over what he'd been told for awhile. "Your... Lex. He wasn't injured badly from the crash? --After you revived him, I mean?"

Clark blinked, then realized he'd been calling his nemesis 'Lex' for awhile now. "No. He was shaken up, but he was fine. Chloe's always sworn that he got an enhanced immune system as a meteor power. He doesn't have asthma anymore, and it's apparently also why he lost his hair."

Lex sat back slowly in his wheelchair and gave Clark an unreadable look. "He doesn't have asthma?" he echoed.

"No." Something occurred to Clark and he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Why, do you?"

Lex nodded. "It... isn't as bad as it used to be. But I do still have to keep my inhaler on me at all times."

Clark nodded. "Ok. Good to know." Then he paused. "I'm glad you don't have problems. With all the farms in the area -- the fields and blooms, and the cattle and livestock and animals -- if you haven't had an attack in awhile, you've probably grown out of it almost entirely."

Lex gave him a small somewhat disbelieving smile, but didn't argue.

"So, yeah. Um, now that I explained, how mad are you exactly? On a scale of one to ten?" Clark asked, straightening. He tried not to flinch in advance.

"With one 'not at all', and ten 'very much so'?"

Clark nodded.

"Hmm. I'd have to say..." He looked into Clark's eyes. "It depends on how guilty you feel about lying to your Lex."

"At the time, or now?"

Lex gave him a look. "Does it matter?"

"Considering that nowadays my nemesis generally does things like clone fully-sentient bodies of himself for spare parts to heal himself from life-threatening injuries, stab people to death and get rid of the bodies, and run and fund a multitude of illegal research programs up to and including human experimentation on test subjects who he basically takes off the streets in broad daylight? Not to mention how he likes to hand Intergang cargo containers full of Kryptonite weapons under the table to give me trouble and keep me distracted from what he's doing, hoping I'm too busy with them to deal with him, and otherwise spends his time trying to figure out ways to kill, maim, or otherwise get rid of me? Yeah, it kind of does."

Lex looked a little green.

"Look, I feel bad about lying to my friend, and I always did. But my nemesis?" Clark shook his head. "Maybe it's partially my fault for lying to him so much, and everything else that I didn't do better. Maybe I wasn't good enough to help him and be the friend he needed. But I was young and stupid, and..." Clark shook his head. "When it comes right down to it, he ended up with a clean slate. He knew my secret and nearly killed me at one point before going underground into hiding, but then he nearly lost his memory a couple years ago before he really got going and started trying to use that information against me. The person who tried to pull off the memory wipe had gone off trying to to do it all on her own, and got stabbed to death in the process. We never recovered her body." Clark grimaced.

"He could have pretended that he didn't remember -- and he does pretend, to his own advantage, with most everyone else -- he could have started over. I might never have known, if he hadn't told me outright. He basically had a do-over, and left to his own devices with nobody messing with him, harrying him, or anything else? With a chance to do exactly what he wanted, whatever he wanted, with no real past consequences, and the perfect opportunity to clean up his act? He still decided to pick up pretty much right where he left off."

Lex looked even paler. Clark wondered what was wrong... up until Lex opened his mouth.

"He... he's a monster?" Lex whispered. It wasn't really a question, and the fear in Lex's eyes...

Oh.

Oh _shit_.

"Lex, you're nothing like him--" Clark started, then proceeded to begin mentally kicking himself multiple times.

"Why, because I didn't get blasted with some weird form of exotic space-radiation? I lost my legs, and I've been... I've been really, really bitter about it. I have every reason to want to take out my pain on other people. I--"

"Lex, it's not just that. You're--" God, Lex was still panicking, and damnit, when had he forgotten what normal life and normal people were like? Clark searched for words. "You're not gonna wake up one morning and just suddenly decide to start doing all sorts of horrible things."

"How the hell do you know?!"

"Because he didn't--" Clark shook his head and grimaced -- this wasn't the right way to explain this. He groped about his mind, trying to grasp for an explanation that would--

"My nemesis has never been completely crazy, or evil, or insane. He... --He has reasons for what he does, even if I really, really don't agree with any of it. At all."

"What on earth could possibly justify--?" Lex said, recoiling in his chair, completely taken aback.

"I'm not sure about 'justify', but..." Clark blew out a breath and ran his fingers through his hair. "Look, I don't pretend to know what goes through his head at any given time anymore, let alone understand it, but... well, he doesn't trust any of us Heroes; that's for sure. And he's said several times that he's worried about another attempted alien invasion of the Earth. I guess... if he really doesn't think that we would help stop something like that if it happens again, and that he was all alone in fighting a threat like that, he'd... Well, he wouldn't just give up. He never gives up. And he's a pretty responsible person, when it comes down to it. Secret evil labs that need blowing up aside, he does take care of LuthorCorp and LexCorp and his law-abiding employees really well. There's a reason why he isn't in jail. People wouldn't put up with it if that was all he did, and the majority of it... --it's not like he doesn't do a lot of good, publicly."

"He's had a lot of bad stuff happen to him in the past from things to do with Kryptonians of the more world-conquering variety, that I just couldn't protect him from, even if he can't remember most of what happened because he was possessed by-- by an evil alien ghost and not in control of his body at the time. In a sense, he's personally invested in making sure everybody is safe -- that nothing like that ever happens again," Clark said, hating Brainiac and Zod all over again for hurting Lex. "Thinking... no, _believing_ that he's the only person capable of stopping an invasion would... probably push him to do whatever he thought it would take to... save everyone, I guess." Clark shrugged. "He's always been more of an 'ends' guy than a 'means' guy. If the 'ends' don't turn out ok, one way or another, he pretty much considers himself a failure straight-out. To him, I doubt the 'means' really matter much until after the fact, if ever, when he's seen the results of whatever he's done, or tried to do."

"So, yeah. He definitely doesn't trust us, he refuses to depend on any of us, he sees most of us as threats, and he even goes out and picks fights with us on purpose sometimes. But..." Clark looked a little abashed and rubbed the back of his neck. "This may sound weird? But he's not a bad person, even though he does a lot of bad things." He sighed. "It's kind of the most frustrating thing about him, really."

"What, that he doesn't kick enough puppies for you to be able to write him off as evil?" Lex snarked, crossing his arms, and still looking highly uncomfortable.

"Something like that," Clark admitted, thinking about no take backs, and how little he'd actually listened to anyone before or during his first nemesis-to-nemesis confrontation. If he had...

Well, that was probably a little much. Not everything was about him, but maybe his nemesis might not have decided to make it a point to act evil sometimes, just to spite him, if he'd just listened a little more.

...But that really wasn't anything Clark could do anything about right now. So he refocused on the present, and how this Lex was faring, instead.

"If... he sees you as a threat, and did... some really horrible things because of that... why aren't you more worried that I might wake up and decide one day that I don't trust you, or that you're too much of a threat to leave to your own devices and... try to do something about it?" Lex finally asked, both looking and sounding horrifically worried.

"Well, it'd be pretty hard for you to do something about it," Clark told him honestly, believing that the idea wouldn't freak him out further, given that he actually seemed to trust him not to do anything horrible and take advantage. "But... I don't know. You... just don't seem like that, I guess." Clark tilted his head, actively considering all of the differences he'd noticed so far between this Lex and his own. "I guess, maybe I have a feeling that you'd at least do me the courtesy of warning me first?" They both seemed similar enough for that, though his nemesis tended to do that less and less often lately. Clark thought it through a little more. "...And it's not like it's the same as if we were on my Earth and you decided to tell -- it won't really matter too much to me in the grand scheme of things if people here find out, since I'm not planning on living here for the rest of my life."

Lex looked startled. "I thought you said before--"

"Look, Lex..." Clark said reasonably, drawing his legs back up to an indian-style sitting posture, and resting his head on his chin, elbows on his knees. "I'd rather not screw things up here and freak everyone out, but if it happens, it happens. I can't take responsibility for an entire planet worth of people -- I don't even try to do that at home."

He held up a hand when Lex looked about to object. "Look, it's one thing for me to try and help out sometimes, and make people's lives easier and safer that way, or otherwise do the things that people can't do themselves right now. It's a completely different thing for me to decide that people aren't capable of taking care of themselves and take their choices away from them. I am _not_ doing that to people," Clark said fiercely. "The minute I decide I'm going to start making decisions _for_ other people..." He shook his head. "That's a very dangerous road to start walking down."

"That's a supervillain thing," Lex said promptly, looking a little worried.

Clark nodded slowly.

"You... limit yourself on purpose."

Clark nodded again.

"But doesn't that mean that you're assuming that you're better than everybody else in an entirely different way? That you think that no-one could stop you if you--"

Clark shook his head. "No. That's part of why the League exists."

"That's your su-- your Hero group, right?"

Clark nodded.

"...You think that your League would... take you out if you got out of hand?" Lex looked worried as hell about that for some reason.

"I certainly hope so."

"But what if they just--" Lex looked frustrated for a moment, running a hand over his head. "What if they decided to go evil and just... --Or if someone messed with their minds and they got tricked into thinking that you'd turned? Do you really trust them that much?" Lex demanded, staring at him searchingly.

"Well..." Clark bit his lip. "I guess so. I kind of have to, I guess. I mean, who else would stop me if I needed stopping?"

"Your nemesis," Lex said firmly, crossing his arms.

Clark laughed.

Lex narrowed his eyes.

"Why is that so funny?"

"Sorry, it isn't really. It's just..." God, how could he explain this? "Look, my nemesis may have a selective memory about it at times, but I _did_ promise him that I'd always be there to stop him. And I _do_. That doesn't really work if _he_ can stop _me_ and... well, it's not like he hasn't tried to kill me before, and failed miserably." Which probably had something to do with his nemesis not _actually_ wanting him dead, permanently or otherwise. Sometimes his nemesis lost his temper and did things in the heat of the moment, of course, but he generally wasn't thinking at his best when he was that emotional, so it evened out the playing field again. The whole thing was actually kind of convoluted, now that Clark thought about it, and he suddenly doubted he could ever explain it properly to this Lex.

"Look, I'm not _stupid_ \-- I don't just fly around in spandex and _tights_." And Clark took a moment to stop and shudder in horror, because, well, _tights_. Uh, no. Form-fitting pants? Yeah, sure, why not. But women's hose? That would be a most-emphatic _**NO**_. Even the original milliskin suit had been pushing it, which is why he'd 'upgraded' (read: replaced and _burned_ ) the thing as soon as he'd been able to after the Apocalypse event. "My bodysuit is bulletproof and has an underlayer that's radiation-proof for the wavelengths Kryptonite gives off."

Lex frowned a little. "I thought you said you didn't wear a mask to obscure your face. How does that stop a headshot?"

"It doesn't, but I've got super-hearing and can hear a gun-trigger click, or an energy-buildup in a weapon, at hundreds of miles away. Kryptonite only works at close range. It's not like I can't duck, or otherwise dodge most stuff, and I'm always on the alert for 'deadzones' in my vision that might be otherwise masking Kryptonite radiation." Clark shrugged. "Plus, Watchtower generally has really good intel on my nemesis' latest open movements, and Intergang's actions, covert or otherwise."

"Your Chloe-Watchtower -- is that Chloe Sullivan?"

Clark nodded, then blinked. "Uh, yeah. --Hey, is she a conspiracy-theory nut here? Or even alive? She was until the asylum security staff caught up to her and she got in a shootout with them in the phantom-induced made-up place... that was the closest to being like this place." Clark stopped for a moment. "That's still really freaking weird to me, by the way."

"The idea of anybody getting possessed and mind-fucked by a disembodied soul-slash-intelligence is still 'really freaking weird' to _me_ , so as far as I'm concerned, we're even," Lex said, turning his chair in place and looking at him sideways, and Clark gave him a rueful wincing smile, realizing that Lex had understood exactly what he'd meant when he'd brought up Zod and his nemesis earlier. "Chloe's still alive and, ah, mostly well. She's currently in Belle Reeve for her most recent freak-out. She'll be out again soon enough... and right back in again, once she stops taking her meds, _again_ ," Lex ended in a mutter as he backed up, turned, and wheeled himself towards the door.

Clark slid his legs down, stood, and followed. He glanced at the desk and scooped up the laptop sitting there, and absently handed it over to Lex. "Here."

"Hm?" Lex said, looking up in surprise and stopping his forward motion.

"You forgot this."

"No, I didn't. It's yours."

"It's... --What?" Clark said, then looked down at the laptop, aghast. "Lex-- I can't--!"

"Yes, you can," Lex said reasonably. "It's an older model. I had its hard drive wiped. No-one was using it; I'm certainly not going to miss it."

"But I can't take this, it's too much and--" Clark stopped at the look Lex was giving him. "...You're not going to take no for an answer, are you?" Clark said, feeling tired and already half-resigned to keeping it.

Lex just smiled back at him. It wasn't a particularly nice smile.

Clark looked down at the laptop. It _was_ really nice, and he _did_ kind of want it. But, god, he didn't even have one of his own back home! He played with it in his hands for a bit, then grimaced, feeling guilty as he set it back down on the desk.

Lex's smile when Clark rejoined him was a great deal happier, and maybe a little smug.

Clark sighed, and after a beat, remembered to say, "Thank you."

Lex nearly stopped wheeling himself forward, he was so startled. "Ah, you're welcome," he said back to Clark over his shoulder.

Clark followed Lex down the hallway, walking at his side sedately.

"...So, what are we doing now?" Clark asked.

"Getting your room better appointed."

"Lex--"

"Not the furniture!" Lex snapped. Clark flinched, startled, and Lex must have caught the motion, because then he took a breath and worked to hold himself in check. After a moment to compose himself, he continued. "You have no clothes to speak of, save what you're wearing."

"Oh." Then Clark smiled. "What, no closet full of clothes waiting for me upon arrival? I"m so disappointed."

"Didn't have your measurements," Lex muttered.

Clark blinked and the smile slid off of his face. "...Uh, Lex?"

"Hm?"

"I was joking."

There was a pause.

"Oh," said Lex.

Clark bit his lip slightly. "Ok, so, which car do you want to take in to town?" Clark said, moving right along. "--Or the van?" Clark amended, realizing that Lex's wheelchair probably wouldn't fit in the backseat or the trunk of any of his sports cars. ...Then he belatedly winced as he realized that that was probably insensitive, since he'd been in a very bad car accident and, if his difficulties in coping were to be taken as implied, that he might not be all that comfortable driving in cars. ...Or might not be able to drive them himself, if the lack of handicapped-accessibility of the van and the house was any big freaking clue to that effect.

"...To town?" Lex echoed, looking up at him in confusion.

Clark had opened his mouth to apologize, but had to close it again at that unexpected response.

"Why would we go in to town?" Lex asked.

"...To go clothes shopping?" Clark said, because really, where else would they get clothes for him? "Fordman's is probably fine. They've got really nice flannel," Clark said a little dreamily.

"...Flannel."

"Yeah. I hardly ever get to wear flannel anymore. I have to wear business suits to work."

"Is that so?" Lex said mildly.

Clark nodded. "I'm a reporter and--"

Lex made a choking noise.

"--Hey! We're not all bad."

Lex gave him a look.

"...What?"

Lex stopped wheeling himself forward and his glare got worse.

Clark had to stop and mentally revisit what he'd said. He was drawing a blank, until he tried to remember when he'd last seen a look like that and--

"I'm _not_ going to report on you!" Clark promised, feeling almost offended at the implication that Lex thought he would.

Lex crossed his arms.

"Oh, come on, Lex!" Clark tried to think of a way to defuse this, because if promises weren't working... maybe reassurances would? "It's not like anyone would believe a word I said -- wrote -- even if I did write something up about you and showed up on somebody's doorstep. Mental patient, right here, remember?"

Lex rolled his eyes, but he started to wheel himself forward again -- straight towards the garage, now.

"Some people wouldn't care about that," he muttered.

Clark followed. "What, like the Metropolis Inquisitor? Some of us have standards, Lex -- I work for the Daily Planet." He paused. "Used to work there." Frowned. "Still do, but not the one here." Frowned again. "Unless they fire me for disappearing, uh..." He blinked, then turned to Lex, "Ok, it's official -- dimensional travel sucks, and English needs more verb tenses."

Lex laughed briefly, then recovered a more serious demeanour. "The Daily Planet has a strict dress code?"

Clark pondered that one. "Well, not exactly. The higher up you go in the food chain, the snappier most people dress, though. But that's not really why I can't wear flannel to work."

"Oh? Why not, then?"

"Because most flannel is red or blue, and goes best with jeans, and that's way too close to my Superman look. I generally wear white and brown to work, nowadays. It helps me stand out less, and that's kind of good for Clark Kent all around, considering."

Lex pursued his lips and looked unhappy. "I don't know how you can stand it."

"It was more of a 'getting used to it again'."

"What?"

Clark rubbed the back of his head and tried to explain. "I mean, I used to wear flannel and jeans to work, and act like myself, and nobody really cared, exactly. Well, except for Lois -- she bullied me into wearing suits so I'd look more professional, and people would take me more seriously, rather than treat me like some hick fresh to the city from out in the boondocks. I actually got a pretty good reputation for chasing down stories and things, with Lois sort of taking me under her wing and showing me the ropes for my first couple of months there. I was able to strike out on my own after that, and I did pretty well, actually." It had even surprised him himself, at the time.

"But when people started to push me towards 'coming out'... well, out of the shadows -- I generally moved so fast that people couldn't see or take pictures of me when I did Hero work unless I slowed down to a blur on purpose -- I talked it over with Lois and she helped me come up with the idea of the 'Clark Kent, Bumbling Reporter' identity, glasses and all. Basically, I just went back to acting the same way I did in freshman year, only more so." Clark shrugged.

"Wait, wait, wait," Lex said. "You mean to tell me that you worked at a newspaper, alongside reporters, for months, looking and acting like yourself, and _then_ you donned glasses and... did your hair differently?" At Clark's nod: "And suddenly started acting more than a little bit out of character, and nobody else -- besides your nemesis -- connected you to Superman?" Lex stared up at him. "I know how differently people can look with a change in hairstyle, the right type of glasses, and a change in posture and affect, even wearing the same clothes, but..." Lex looked halfway horrified. "Were they really such idiots? You're telling me that they _knew_ you!"

Clark sighed and shrugged. "It wasn't all at once. I sort of eased into it and did it for a few months until all the earlier stuff faded a bit in people's minds. People believe what they see, and what they think is easiest to believe. I didn't start planning really coming out as a Hero, no mask, until I was sure people thought the 'new' me was the real me, and had forgotten what they'd seen before." Clark gave him a rueful smile. "Reporters can be pretty self-absorbed, or so absorbed in their stories that they don't pay attention to much else that's going on in the bullpen. And they didn't really know me at the start either, not really. ...Still don't, I guess."

Lex pinched his nose like he was getting a headache. "So, basically, what you're saying is that most reporters are idiots at heart. Good to know."

" _Thanks_ ," Clark said dryly.

"So this Lois -- she knows?" Lex asked lightly.

Oh geez. "Yes, she knows. She's my fiance. And no, she is not a Penelope -- she's too smart to take on my nemesis alone without backup and get herself killed."

"You think Penelope was stupid?"

Hooboy. Clark wasn't going to touch _that_ one with a ten-foot pole. "I think Penelope was a character in a comic book, and that her death was probably set up and used as a plot device to further the story?"

"Touche," Lex said with no small amusement, despite the fact that he'd been neatly outmaneuvered. "...Might I know the last name of this Lois of whom you speak?"

Well, that couldn't hurt anything, could it? "Lane."

Lex nodded once, almost absently, then he came to a screeching halt -- literally.

"Lane? _Lois Lane?_ " he said, staring up at Clark in disbelief, as though he could not have possibly heard him right.

"Uh, yeah?" Clark said, stopping again and turning.

"Lois Lane, as in _General Lane's daughter?_ " he nearly squeaked.

Clark nodded once, tentatively. "She's really not that bad."

Lex looked up at him, agog. " _She's really not that bad?_ "

Clark sighed and rolled his eyes. "Maybe she's different here?" he offered, turning and continuing to walk down the hallway.

Lex stared after him, then shook his head, seemed to come out of it, and started wheeling himself forward again.

"You're dating -- no, engaged to -- General Lane's eldest daughter," he echoed, like he was turning the thought over in his head, except that it had suddenly sprouted spikes -- very handle-with-care.

They moved down the hallway in silence for a bit, until finally Lex said, "You really do love courting disaster, don't you? Hiding in the middle of a cabal of reporters in their thick-as-thieves den, heroing it up without a mask, and now making kissy-face with _Lane?_ "

"Well, what can I say? I grew up in Smallville: meteor-freak, monster, and alien central. Maybe I have no proper appreciation for the concept of danger."

Lex blinked up at him, then laughed.

"I wasn't trying to be funny, Lex."

Lex just laughed harder.

Clark threw up his hands in exasperation.

"Sorry, sorry, just..." Lex grinned up at him, getting himself back under control. "I think I kind of figured that out from the whole 'taking Intergang on when they have Kryptonite weapons' thing."

Clark thought that one over for a minute, and fully drew a blank. "Well, why wouldn't I?"

Lex opened his mouth, then closed it again. Then he said, "Most people run _away_ from danger, Kal."

"They do?"

Lex nodded, almost looking amused. "Yes, Kal. _Away_. Not _towards_ it."

"...Oh. Right. _Civilians._ " Then Clark had to pause a moment as he realized that technically Chloe and Pete -- and Lex, and Lana -- had all been civilians back in Smallville. God, forget normalcy when Chloe and Lex were around: when _was_ the last time--? Oh, right. Before 8'th grade when Chloe had moved in. ...It had been really boring. "--Lex, why shouldn't I run towards danger? I'm a Hero and a superpowered alien, remember?"

"Well, that's hardly an excuse. You started out thinking you were a human civilian," Lex pointed out.

"But I'm not."

"But you thought you were."

"But I'm not."

"But you--" Lex blinked. "... _I'm_ not winning _this_ one, am I?"

"Nope!"

Lex sighed.

Another short silence, then...

"Flannel and jeans."

"Uh huh!"

"...Really."

"It's comfortable!"

Lex sighed again.

By that point they'd gotten to the garage, and Clark held the door for Lex as he wheeled himself in.

"Uh, which vehicle, and do you want me to drive?" Clark offered, glancing around. No sports cars in sight -- just the van from that morning and a limo or two.

"That one," Lex pointed to the van.

"Okay," said Clark, moving forward, and then he stopped as something occurred to him.

"Does Clark have a driver's license here?"

Lex stopped, blinked, then said, "Well, I know _I_ don't anymore." The fact that Lex couldn't drive these vehicles even if he wanted to went uncommented upon. "I'm not sure about him, though."

Clark felt fretful. He really didn't want to get driven about everytime they had a place they might need to go.

Lex seemed to come to a decision. "Help me up front, and then get in the driver's side," he said, more forceful than Clark had ever heard him since being here.

"Lex?"

"If he has a license, then there's no problem. If he doesn't, he can hardly get points on it from you driving me around, when he doesn't even have a record to get the points put on, now can he?" Lex said with a smile.

Clark thought about that a moment, then laughed. He grabbed the right key from the keybox by the door, and proceeded to do just that, careful as he stowed Lex's wheelchair in the back.

"And awaaaaaay we go!" Clark said, turning the key in the engine.

Lex smiled, then he got a suddenly worried look. "Ah, you _do_ know how to drive... right?" he said, tension interweaving through his tone.

Clark made a face like he was thinking, then laughed and stopped teasing when Lex got a horrified look. "Yes, Lex. I've been driving tractors since I was five years old, and trucks since I was eleven. I think I can handle a van."

"Right," Lex said, marginally relaxing his death grip on the door handle.

They were doing just fine up until the gate and the guard post.

"Where do you think you're going?" the guard asked, as Clark rolled down the window.

"Out," said Clark, because, really, rude much?

The guard's eyes narrowed, and so Clark said, "Out to the forever fields, here and anon, lest the break of day be wasted. Forsooth, I hear the call of those gentle bright fields upon the breeze and --really? Nothing? Isn't that a book of Shakespeare sonnets right there that you're reading?" Clark asked, sitting up a little farther in the driver's seat and craning his head.

The gate guard glared at him, as he made a covert protective motion to cover the book and move it off to the side completely out of view.

Lex bent forward and looked across Clark at the guard. "We need to go shopping in town. Please open the gate."

Clark turned in place and frowned down at Lex. He frowned further as he looked back at the guard and caught him looking between the two of them skeptically.

"What, you heard him, didn't you?" Clark demanded. "What's the problem? Don't you work for him?"

"I work for Mr. Luthor," the guard said primly, and it was all Clark could do not to suck in a breath -- or smack the man. Fucking Lionel -- the controlling bastard.

"Ok, fine, you know what? Let's do _this_ ," said Clark. "I'm gonna pretend that _I'm_ a crazy person who just got released from Belle Reeve this afternoon, and that _you're_ a gate guard who's got me locked in and won't let me out even though I've been released. And if you _don't_ open that gate, then I'll just back this van right up that hill behind us, get up a good head of steam, and then ram into the gate at full speed, and _you_ can be the one to explain to people why the gate is wrecked, while _I_ will happily be free and out and shopping for clothes in town. Orrrrrrrr... you can just save yourself some unhappy explaining and just open the gate. Your choice!" Clark ended brightly, with a brilliant shit-eating grin.

Clark could almost hear Lex quietly panicking beside him.

The gate guard looked at Clark doubtfully. Then he looked past him, probably at Lex. Then he looked back at Clark again, with growing uncertainty.

Clark started making revving noises with the engine, keeping his gaze on the guard and smiling. Manual transmissions were cool that way.

The gate guard glanced between the two of them one more time, and then he reached out and pressed a button, watching Clark.

The gate creaked and started trundling open.

"Thank you," Clark said graciously, with a huge grin.

The guard blinked at him.

Clark peaked the engine, out of gear, up to a roar, still watching the guard, grin widening to an almost-maniacal stretch.

Clark heard a soft 'thump' as Lex braced his hands against the dashboard.

The gate finally cleared the front end of the car, Clark finally looked away and shifted it into gear--

They jerked forward ...and trundled along at something like two miles per hour through the opening.

Lex let out a rush of breath all at once, eyes wide, glancing around as he really took in what all had just happened.

And then he bent over and started laughing hysterically, wiping tears out of his eyes as he grinned over at Clark through the laughter.

Clark grinned.

"...Oh, god," Lex chuckled, as he finally started calming down something like a mile out from the gate and collapsed back in his seat. "Did you see the look on his face?" he grinned.

"Uh huh," Clark smiled.

"God..." Lex said, staring off into the distance out of the windows.

"Hell, Kal, would you really have run the gate?" he asked after awhile.

"No. I wouldn't want to scare you with an on-purpose accident like that, and ruin the front of your van besides," Clark admitted. "I don't think your groundskeeper would have been very happy with me, though," he added.

"...My groundskeeper? Why?"

"Because I would've left horrible tracks in the grass, driving up and around the border of the forest, until I got past the edge of the estate walls."

Lex cracked up all over again.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	4. Meet The Family

~*~*~*~*~*~

"So, you know where Fordman's is?" Lex asked casually, relaxing back into the seat as they pulled into town.

"Sure. Same place it's ever been. I checked." Clark shrugged. "It's not like the asylum walls had lead in them."

"Mmm," said Lex, then he frowned and glanced over. "Wait, you only looked? Why didn't you just speed through town and back?"

"Because someone might have noticed I was gone from Belle Reeve?" Clark said.

Lex stared at him.

"You were in Belle Reeve _this whole time_?"

"Uh, no," said Clark worriedly, glancing over at Lex. "Alien from another reality, remember?"

Lex nearly said something, then stopped, seemed to backtrack, and said, carefully, "From the first time I visited you, when you 'woke up' here, until this afternoon, how many times did you leave Belle Reeve?"

"I didn't."

Lex froze for a moment, completely taken aback. "Why the hell not?!"

Clark frowned. Wasn't it obvious? "Because someone might have noticed--"

"Jesus Christ, Kal -- you didn't leave?! Not once?!?"

"Well, no."

Lex's jaw dropped and he looked at Clark, aghast, then pressed both hands to his forehead and closed his eyes. "God, I thought--" He clenched his teeth like he was in pain.

"Lex? Are you all right?" Clark asked, glancing over.

"I didn't know," Lex murmured. "I thought-- I'm sorry, Kal, I would've gotten you out sooner, I--"

"Lex, hey, it wasn't all that bad," Clark said, briefly touching a gentle hand to Lex's shoulder.

"...You're kidding."

"No, really. It wasn't nearly as bad as the place is at home, and it could've been much worse, easily."

Lex dropped his hands, looked over and stared at him.

"It's better than it is in your reality," Lex echoed uncertainly.

Clark nodded.

"It could've been much worse," Lex said slowly.

Clark nodded again.

"Right..." Lex said quietly, pinching the bridge of his nose, before looking forward again, out the windshield.

After an awkward silence, Clark pulled up to the curb and parked next to the rundown movie theater.

Which wasn't just a closed and boarded up movie theater anymore.

It... wasn't quite the Talon, but...

...well, Clark wasn't entirely sure _what_ it was. Clearly Lex hadn't bought full- or part-ownership of the plot, because it wasn't a parking structure for downtown Smallville _or_ a coffeehouse.

"Ever been here?" Clark asked Lex, coming around to the curb side after retrieving Lex's wheelchair and helping him into it.

Lex shook his head.

"Where is Fordman's?" Lex asked.

Clark pointed across the street like a compass, and started to walk around the van, but stopped and turned when he realized he wasn't being followed.

He was amazed to find Lex sitting there patiently, right where he had been, seemingly waiting for something.

"Um..." Clark said. "Something wrong?"

"No?" Lex said with faint amusement, looking up at Clark as he walked back over.

Clark waited, and Lex finally said, deliberately, "Aren't you going to push me?"

Clark blinked. "Um, do you want me to?" Sure, this Lex seemed to give up control a lot more than his nemesis, but... as far as Clark had seen so far, Lex hadn't seemed to _like_ it, certainly. It was actually disconcerting how 'easygoing' this Lex was about it, at least in not openly complaining about it. It probably wouldn't have worried Clark nearly so much, if it didn't feel like Lex seemed to not realize he had a choice in the matter.

And, with the way Lex was blinking up at him now, it wasn't setting that worry at ease even the least little bit.

"Please," Lex said, settling into the chair comfortably and gesturing at the handles at the back.

"Well, ok," Clark said, half under his breath, and took control of the wheelchair for him.

"You have a problem with wheeling me around?" Lex asked, in a tone of voice Clark couldn't readily identify, and that was saying something.

"Noooo," said Clark. "I was just wondering if you might."

He saw Lex blink again, and he was quiet as Clark waited for a gap in the traffic and then got them across the street.

"Clark!" he heard, and turned his head to see Jonathan Kent walking up the street at a fast pace.

Clark blinked and was, for once in his life, grateful that he'd been to Mirror-box Earth and met the still-alive Jonathan Kent there, if only because it meant he had a better handle on the kick-in-the-gut feeling this time, having already experienced it once before.

He didn't have much time to contemplate the possible benefits versus malefactors that might be associated with Jonathan meeting a sane 'son', when the insane son would be back here, sooner or later. Was it more cruel or kind to give him a few moments of normalcy, when that might possibly instill some sort of false hope in him that--?

He was wrapped up in a big bear hug that he reflexively returned before he could complete the thought.

"Uh, hey dad," he said weakly, trying not to give in to the hug too much because... Yeah. He really didn't want to examine that thought too closely.

They slowly pulled away from each other, and Clark gave him an uneasy smile.

"Clark? Is something wrong, son?" Jonathan asked, putting his hands on his shoulders, staring him in the eyes.

"I'm fine--" Clark started.

"I heard you were let out, that you were staying at that _Luthor_ place--"

Clark tensed and pulled away at the shift in Jon's tone and moved in front of Lex's wheelchair, between Lex and Jonathan, in pure reflex.

Jonathan looked startled. Then he frowned as he glanced between the two of them. "Clark...?" he said slowly, his tone the start of a warning.

"Don't, ok?" Clark said roughly, a million similar ghosts of arguments with his dad dancing in his memory behind his eyes. "He's..." Clark straightened. "He's family," Clark said firmly. He heard a slight intake of breath from Lex.

Jonathan looked like he'd been slapped, then furious. "He is _not_ \--!"

"You never came to visit me in Belle Reeve. Not once." Not at any time during the four weeks he'd been there, and when he'd asked the staff about it they'd just laughed. Not so easily deterred, he'd gotten his hands on the sign-in logbook at one point, and realized that the same was true for Martha, as well. This reality's Clark had basically been abandoned there for at least five years, if not more. The log hadn't gone back that far.

Jonathan stopped short, and Clark heard more than felt Lex still behind him.

"Clark--" Jonathan worked his jaw for a minute. "I didn't hear you were awake until well after--! Martha got full custody of you in the divorce. I wasn't even allowed to see you, after I got declared unfit."

Clark blinked. He glanced down at Lex.

Lex looked up at him and nodded ever so slightly.

"You trust his word over mine!?" he heard Jon explode in front of him.

Clark's head whipped up. "I know him better than you!" he said without thinking.

"What?!"

"I think what K-Clark means to say is that he realizes his memory is a bit spotty, and that I've spent more time with him since he's woken up than you've been able to thus far," Lex said quickly, wrapping a gentle hand around Clark's arm.

Jonathan looked at the two of them in disbelief.

"He... They did something to your memory, son?" Jonathan said, in a bit of shock at the thought, but Clark could hear the beginnings of fury under it. The beginnings of a fight.

"I remember all sorts of things. That's not the problem." At Jonathan's confusion, he soldiered forward, now that he had his attention. "It's not that I don't remember, it's just that... I know that there's a difference between my memories and what actually happened here," Clark said carefully, keeping to the truth. He didn't want to risk the possibility that Jonathan might be able to pick up an attempt at a lie. "I just don't know how much of a difference, yet." Which was also true, in the strictest sense of the phrase.

He could almost hear Lex smiling behind him at his deceptive truths.

Jonathan frowned. "Well, I don't care what nonsense those Luthors have been putting in your head. They're poison, and you should be keeping to the people who actually care about you."

"Lex cares about me," Clark said simply, then overrode Jon, saying, "When he realized what was going on with the meds the doctors were using, he had them change them to something that would work better. And when he thought it'd be ok for me to be out, he got me out." Still true, all true, and more than he'd ever been able to do for his Lex -- and yes, Clark appreciated the irony of that like a knife in the back. "So don't get mad at him just because he did something you couldn't."

Jonathan looked back up at Clark grimly, with a searching gaze. "Are you all right, son?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't have to stay up at the Luthor place, son. You're past the age of majority. You can make your own decisions--"

"Actually, I have guardianship of Clark, currently," Lex cut in.

Jonathan glared down at him, but continued. "You can come home with me," he stated, ignoring what Lex had said.

"I... I'm not sure about coming back to the farm," Clark said, feeling uneasy. Having moved to Metropolis with Lois, and it having been completely monetarily infeasible to keep up the place while he was living in the city, had only been part of the reason why he'd sold it...

Jonathan stared at him for a moment, and Clark felt Lex's hand tighten slightly on his arm -- a warning of some kind, though for what, Clark didn't know.

"Son..." Jonathan said, swallowing.

"Clark!" he heard, and they all turned to see Lana and Nell approaching.

...Wait, what was _Nell_ doing in town?

Jonathan moved back towards them a step or two, never really taking his eyes off Clark or Lex, and Nell gave Clark a... rather warm smile, actually. Ok, this was officially weird. Clark frowned as he glanced between them, trying to figure out what he was missing.

He watched in confusion and almost alarm as she scooted up to Jonathan and slid under his arm, relaxing easily into him, while Lana bounced up and gave Clark a big hug.

"Clark! You're out!"

"You're feeling better, I hope?" Nell asked him.

"Uh, yeah..." Clark said, slowly disengaging from Lana's hug about as quickly as he could without rousing suspicion, wondering what the hell was going on, because it almost seemed like...

Lana was simply ecstatic, so much so it was almost creepy. "Oh Clark, we've got your old room all set up for you across the hall, and--"

"My _what?_ " Clark said, stepping back from Lana and bumping into Lex's wheelchair.

"K-Clark, relax, ok?" Lex said quietly, sliding his hand farther up his arm, almost wrapping his entire arm around Clark's own, and rubbing his thumb soothingly against the inside of Clark's forearm.

It really was amazing how much more stable Clark felt with Lex doing that.

"Ok, I think maybe I'm missing something here?" Clark said slowly. "Who is 'we', and why would I have a room at your house, Lana?" he asked, not sure he'd understood her implication correctly.

All three of them seemed to come to a stop-motion halt and stared at him uncomfortably for a bit.

"Clark, you..." Lana said uncertainly.

Lex cleared his throat quietly, then started in, rapid-fire and matter-of-fact, but otherwise without judgment or censure. "A few weeks after my accident, and in the wake of the fallout from your tangential involvement in it, Martha filed for divorce. As part of that, Martha aimed to have Jonathan declared an unfit parent under summary judgment -- under the notion that as having seen the warning signs of your illness and not having done anything about it, he was guilty of gross negligence. He eventually lost the custody battle; she gained full rights. She remarried to Lionel; Jon remarried to Nell. In the meantime, before Jonathan lost his guardianship rights and you were committed, you all were living together at the house on the Potter horse farm after Jonathan had to sell the Kent farm, the homestead plot, and all of the cattle due to the outstanding debt already on the land, and a need to pay off both the bank loans and the final divorce settlement." Lex paused, then added, "I believe that they've bought most of the plot back from the bank since then, due to the success of their other ventures in town, but it is my understanding that it isn't farmland or grazing fields anymore."

"Oh," Clark said, absorbing all this. "I, uh..."

The three Lang-Potter-Kents (maybe just Kents?) were still staring at him with some ungodly mixture of pity, concern, rage, and horror.

"You don't remember any of that?" Lana asked.

Clark shook his head slowly.

"But... But you weren't even in Belle Reeve yet!" she said angrily. "How could you not remember--!"

Clark had never been able to deal well with Lana when she was angry, and that didn't seem to be any different now with this Lana. The best he could do was lean away from her a little and wince.

"Lana!" Nell said sharply. "If he doesn't remember, he doesn't remember!"

"But--!" Lana turned to Nell, then back to Clark, and said, almost pleadingly, "It's probably just that you only just got out again, and after all those drugs..." She shook her head and then said, "If you come back with us, I'm sure that seeing everything will help jog your memory..."

The hopeful look in her eyes was making him nearly as sick as her Kryptonite necklace used to.

"I don't think that will help me remember anything that happened here, Lana," Clark said slowly. "I'm sorry."

"Well, regardless, dear, we do have your old room set up, and you can come over whenever you feel comfortable doing so," Nell said. "To visit, or to stay. All right?"

Ok, this was definitely Twilight Zone levels of weird. Was Lana's Aunt Nell on happy pills or something? Because she actually seemed sincere.

"Uh, thank you," Clark said, feeling discomfited. "But... I'd really rather stay with Lex for now, if that's all right..."

Jonathan looked about to object, but with a shift in posture and a look from Nell silenced him.

"Of course. Whatever you need," Nell said matter-of-factly, all understanding.

Lana, however, was a different story.

" _No!_ You _can't_ stay with him! You've always been _obsessed_ with him!" Lana spat out in a poisonous tone, looking like she wanted to stomp a foot against the ground... or strangle Lex. "It's not good for you to stay up there, locked in with him all day, day-in and day-out! You'll just get worse again, and go right back to the loony bin, and--"

"Lana!" Nell said harshly, stepping forward and pulling her back.

"No!" Lana yelled. "You _know_ I'm right, mom!"

And then she broke down crying right in the middle of the sidewalk.

Holy shit.

Clark wanted to creep away and hide, god knew where, someplace he'd never be found maybe, but that would be difficult to do, what with Lex in the wheelchair and all. It wasn't like he could just leave Lex behind, after all.

So instead, he had to stand there and watch Lana's display while Nell took her by the shoulders, and Jonathan put an arm around her, and they both talked to her soothingly in undertones through her sobs as they led her off. Nell shot him -- and Lex, too, holy crap! -- an _apologetic_ glance back as they walked away.

Clark unfroze and let out a long relieved breath once the threesome turned at the street corner and were out of normal human sight.

"Jesus," he said, sitting down on the armrest of Lex's wheelchair, carefully floating just a little of his mass off so as not to let his weight overturn it.

"You ok?" Lex asked.

"Let's put it this way," Clark said shakily. "I was _not_ expecting _that_."

"I take it things went a little differently on your Earth, Kal?"

"Mom and dad never divorced, Nell was 'Aunt Nell' to Lana and never a 'mom', Nell always hated me, and dad never sold the farm; I did, at the end, after mom gifted it to me, but it was because I thought she wanted me to, for what I had thought were obvious reasons, and also because I couldn't have taken care of it properly _and_ lived and worked in Metropolis with Lois at the same time without some pretty hard questions being asked." He took a breath, in and out, and shook his head. "And because I couldn't take staying around the farm any longer," he said, out-loud for the first time. "I... just wanted to move on with my life. In Metropolis. Mom got really mad at me for selling it, too." He turned in place and looked down at Lex. "And I never lived with Lana on the Potter horse farm. She did live with me for awhile on our farm, but that was years ago." He stopped. "And again only a couple of years ago, but that was for only about a week."

"What did your dad have to say about your selling the farm?"

"He didn't; he was dead."

Lex paused uncertainly, thoughts flickering behind his eyes so quickly and causing such vivid expressions on his face that Clark felt like he ought to be able to see them like pictures on film if only he sped up to super-speed and looked carefully. He refrained, though only just.

"I'm sorry." Lex said finally.

Clark shrugged, not really able to express the concept of what he was feeling any better than Lex had his own.

And after a tentative pause...

"I assume your mother was not still living there at the time you sold the property?"

"God, no!" Clark said, shocked. "--No, she'd found a boyfriend with his own place in the city, who she put down as her new residence for the US senate seat, _long_ before that. Mostly she's living in D.C. these days."

Lex blinked at him. "Your Martha... Kent?" Clark nodded, and Lex let out a startled little breath, then shook himself. "She's a senator...?"

"Yeah."

"Huh." Lex looked completely blown away.

"It's a little complicated how she got there," Clark admitted in lieu of an explanation, not wanting to talk about all the scandal and deaths. "She does a good job, though."

"You might be biased," Lex teased.

"Maybe a little," Clark smiled.

"And you and Lana...?"

"--Had a relationship? Yeah, but it didn't work out." Clark grimaced. "Any of the times."

"Oh." Lex had the social grace to wince sympathetically.

"...Uh, Lex, this may be a stupid question, but... did _you_ ever have a relationship with her?"

Lex stared up at him like he was _out of his flipping mind_.

"Right. Just wondering," Clark muttered, feeling a little relieved, kind of like he did when he'd just narrowly dodged a literal Kryptonite bullet to the heart.

"...Do I even want to know?" Lex asked.

"Not in the slightest," Clark said immediately. That took no thought at all.

"Ok, then."

There was a pause.

"...Kal?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you think that we...?"

Clark looked down at Lex, who had a naked and strangely-hopeful look on his face. It took Clark a minute to decipher the actual question, and the space of a breath to think it through.

"No clue. I don't know what she's like here." One tense and strife-filled minute of really strange conversation was hardly enough to make a judgment like that.

"Okay," said Lex.

And that seemed to be the end of it.

Clark sat there perched on the armrest for awhile with Lex. He let his eyes stay shut on the next blink, half-floating and leaning against the back of the wheelchair and just enjoying the feeling of closeness. Lex hadn't let go of his arm yet.

They stayed that way until Clark felt ready to get up again and walk into Fordman's with Lex.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	5. Zen and the Art Of Clothes Shopping

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark had gone through several shirts, jeans, and other assorted articles of clothing, and was looking over shoes before he turned around and realized that Lex had a pile of goods on his lap -- that he'd been trailing around after Clark and picking up the things that Clark had been mentally marking as things that he wanted, and would get as soon as he earned enough money...

"What are you doing?" Clark asked, staring at the pile. "I can't afford any of that, yet."

"I know. I'm buying it."

There was a pause.

"--For you," Lex clarified, as if that wasn't obvious.

"Lex, you can't--"

"I think I damn well can. I have a credit card that works, and I'm not afraid to use it," Lex jibed.

"But--"

"--You know, I was feeling put out before," Lex overrode him smoothly, "But I'm not anymore. Do you know why?"

Clark felt a little uneasy, then shook his head.

"It's because I finally realized that it's not _me_ at all -- you don't take _anything_ you see as a gift well from _anyone_ , not even people you should rightly consider to be family," Lex said lightly.

Clark swallowed, then said, "That's not--"

Lex fixed him with a look.

Clark stopped, and rethought how he should put his initial defensive reaction. "I don't see why I should think of them as family."

"All right then," Lex said, good-naturedly enough. "Let's do a little thought experiment," he said mock-jovially.

Clark groaned and let his head drop back, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. He _hated it_ when Dr. Cohn did those. Stupid 'thought experiments' -- they were always nothing but trouble! He bet Lex's would be worse.

"Let's say that we were on your earth, and you'd had some sort of episode or whatnot and had to have been institutionalized, but that you were all better, clean bill of health and everything, no chance of a relapse," Lex said. "And let's say that your mother came to--"

"Lois," Clark interrupted, tilting his head back upright and glaring sideways down at Lex. "Lois would come to get me."

Lex glanced up at him. "My thought experiment, my rules."

"Fine," Clark said grumpily under his breath, sitting down on the short bench in the shoe section and crossing his arms as he gave Lex his full attention, because this was probably going to take awhile.

"Let's say, for the sake of argument, that your mother came to pick you up instead of Lois, and that Lois, for whatever reason, could not or would not be able to put you up in lodging."

"Okay," Clark grumbled, not really liking the implications of that one bit, but going along with it anyway because he really didn't feel like finding out just then if _this_ Lex went after things like a dog with a bone like his nemesis oftentimes did.

"And let's say that your mother told you that she'd set up a room for you--"

"Her boyfriend's place isn't that big, and I don't think--"

"--at her place in D.C.--" Lex continued, with another look.

"But she'd have to rearrange things at her house if she did that!" Clark complained, throwing up his hands. "I wouldn't want her to go to any trouble--"

"--and I think I've already made my point without even having to bring up how you'd probably feel about her buying a starter wardrobe for you or getting you anything else that she thought you might need," Lex ended.

Clark shut up.

He thought about it.

...He _really_ didn't like the conclusion he came to.

Yup. He'd been right. Lex's thought experiments _were_ worse than Cohn's.

He crssed his arms again and _glared_ at Lex.

Lex held up his hands, palms out, in a 'don't kill the messenger' gesture of surrender.

"It wouldn't go that way anyway," Clark said. "I have my own money--"

"And that would be relevant how?" Lex said calmly, folding his hands in his lap.

Clark took a breath to argue, then stopped and frowned.

"I'm an adult male, and I am fully capable of taking care of myself," Clark said, finally.

"I'm also not seeing how that's relevant, either."

Clark felt frustrated in the extreme.

"How often did your parents buy things for you?" Lex asked out of the blue.

"What?" Clark said, startled. "What does that have to do with--"

"--Just answer the question," Lex cut him off.

Clark felt discomfited, and it probably showed. "Not very often. But the stuff I needed, I got," he said a little grumpily. He'd never been a charity case or anything.

"What about the things you wanted?"

Clark blinked at him. "What, like Christmas or birthdays?"

Lex looked at him for a long time.

"No," Lex said carefully. "Any time other than that."

Clark frowned. "Usually I did odd jobs for people, saved up, and got that stuff for myself. Why?"

"Did you ever get an allowance?"

"Sure."

"How much a week?"

"In high school? Twenty dollars." Clark left out that he hadn't taken it when the farm finances were particularly stretched thin, though; he'd just gone without. ...And that that had happened a lot, with the farm going into worse and worse debt. The most he'd ever taken by that point was five dollars or so, every couple of weeks. He could get by finding ways to earn money by that point, after all.

Unfortunately, Lex seemed to have picked up on that somehow, because he took a deep breath, then looked away and sighed. "Well, that explains a lot," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"Kal, that's not normal--"

"How would you know?" Clark shot back, and only regretted saying it a little.

Lex fixed him with a pretty impressive glare. "I attended college on-campus for my undergrad--"

"At an Ivy League school."

Lex gritted his teeth. "There were plenty of students there on fellowship, or who had student loans. And before you shoot that down, I also went to several student conferences while in attendance, and met with plenty of other students attending cheaper colleges, and even some from community colleges, if you can believe that. We talked a bit. I _do_ know what I'm talking about."

"Most of them were probably at least middle-class and not from farming backgrounds," Clark pointed out.

"I know. But the point remains. _Most_ people are not farmers anymore, and _most_ people who work nine-to-five jobs can give their children twenty-dollar allowances, or more, _consistently_ every week, and buy them games and gifts and things on random occasions, without _ever_ worrying about breaking the bank, missing a loan payment, or going into credit card debt."

"So?"

" _So_ , Kal, growing up you probably saw a lack of self-sufficiency as a bad thing, because having your parents buying something for you probably meant all of you not having money for something you considered essential, or at least more important, later, and maybe even going into even worse debt down the line."

Christ.

"It wasn't _that_ bad," Clark protested, but Lex obviously was having nothing for it.

"Good or bad isn't the issue here. Whatever the cause, this response seems to be so ingrained in you at this point that you completely balk at even the _idea_ of depending on your own mother to the slightest degree. And this despite the fact that she is someone who, I have the feeling, cares about you very much and who you seem to trust, and who I don't doubt is more than capable of helping to support you on a senator's salary." Lex fixed him with a gaze. "Most people may not be from farming backgrounds, but most people are able to accept gifts."

"Maybe I just don't like gifts," Clark muttered.

"Just think about it, would you?" Lex said, letting a little exasperation creep into his voice.

"Yes, mom," Clark said sarcastically.

Lex froze for a moment, as he realized the sort of implication he'd just drawn from his scenario.

Clark snickered.

Lex stuck out his tongue at him.

"A brother would do this, too," Lex said loftily at Clark's startled look.

"...True enough," Clark admitted easily.

Lex blinked, and was obviously trying to decide whether Clark had been agreeing about the offer of help, or the tongue-sticking-out bit.

"A brother would also let his brother pay him back later," Clark said, taking pity on him... sort-of.

Lex pulled a face.

"You really don't have to get a job," he said again.

"But I really want to," Clark replied, all-innocence.

Lex made another face.

"I can't believe you're jumping the lines to pursue gainful employment instead of enjoying a life of luxury and idleness, you class-traitor, you," Lex said mock-seriously, feigning bored-socialite. (Clark loved it when he did that -- it was always funny.)

Clark grinned, stuck out his own tongue with a 'nyahhh' sound, and went back to trying on new shoes.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	6. Warning Signs

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex had a rather large pile of things in his lap by the time they were finished shopping. Lex took the last pair of shoes up, clapped Clark good-naturedly on the knee, and started to wheel away with a smile towards the cash register.

Clark got up from the bench to follow... and found himself on the floor.

"Kal?!" Lex said looking down at him.

"I--" Clark felt more than a little dazed as he pushed himself to a seated position. When had Lex wheeled back over to him?

He grimaced and put a hand to his head, as the confusion worsened.

"Kal, what's wrong? You just... collapsed," Lex said, sounding worried.

"I--" Clark blinked as a thought struck him out of nowhere. A rather scary thought. He looked up at Lex.

"Fairview Psychiatric Hospital," Clark said, feeling himself go a little pale.

"What?"

"The Phantom." Clark grimaced and looked away as he tried to get his thoughts in order, but they felt like they were swirling all about. "When I was hallucinating, when that Phantom tried to take me over back home, and I 'met' that not-real Lex in the wheelchair -- in that fake reality maze he built in my head, that I thought of first when I found myself here, I was at _Fairview Psychiatric Hospital_. Belle Reeve _didn't exist_. Jonathan had died. Martha had married Lionel only _after_ Jonathan... Lana and Nell had bought the farm after Jon died, and Lana was living _there_." He looked up at Lex again. "It's not the same."

"That surprises you?"

"No, I-- Lex, I thought it was the same!" Clark cried out in desperation as he looked up at him, trying to explain. "When I first woke up, in that room in Belle Reeve, I wasn't thinking Fairview, I was thinking _Belle Reeve_. I was confusing it with that mental attack, but I thought it was Belle Reeve!" Clark shivered. Something was really wrong, something _felt_ really wrong, but he couldn't quite grasp _what_...

"But it was Belle Reeve."

"I know, but..."

Lex was frowning down at him, and Lex glanced down at his own hands, then blinked and looked back to Clark. He reached out and gently touched Clark's forehead.

"It's a little after three-o'clock," Lex said, in an odd tone of voice, withdrawing his hand without pulling away .

"What?"

"It's a little after three-o'clock. It's about the time you usually have your daily session with Dr. Cohn, isn't it?"

Clark frowned up at him and then looked away as he scrubbed his hands through his hair roughly. "Lex, this isn't just some weird panic attack because I'm not seeing my head shrink," he said shakily, angrily. "That doesn't explain it, and it can't have anything to do with him; I was misremembering even _before_ I ever started having daily sessions with him." Clark paused, trying yet again to force his thoughts back into a semblance of order. "I didn't talk about anything but Belle Reeve, or bring up Fairview at all, on that first day, did I?"

"No, you didn't," Lex said slowly.

Clark dropped his hands and made a frustrated noise.

"So you misremembered some things. Is it that bad? You were rather stressed out at the time."

"Lex, I don't misremember things."

"You don't? Not ever?"

"No, never!"

"Not even once?"

"Lex, I may have missing time sometimes, or blank spots, from some _explainable_ weirdness or another, but I've never _not_ been able to recall something that wasn't from one of those times, and I've _never_ **misremembered** _anything_."

"Okay," Lex said, taking that at face value and thinking hard. "Do you think it might have been an aftereffect of whatever happened to swap you and Clark between realities?"

"That's--" Clark was about to object, every instinct in him screamed at him to... but suddenly something gave out internally. He felt... lost for a moment, and instead he sighed and his shoulders slumped. "I don't know. I don't know what happened, so I can't really guess. But it seems kind of unlikely that whatever it was would linger around for more than a _month_ , Lex," Clark told him plaintively. "And I don't know of of anything that would make me _misremember_ anything, short of some kind of telepath tampering with my memories directly."

"How likely is that?"

"Pretty unlikely," Clark said grumpily, stretching out his legs and leaning back against the wall of shoeboxes. He thumped his head back against it lightly. "Even less likely considering that I'm suddenly remembering things correctly again, now. Besides, most telepaths and mindreaders can't even hear me, so..." He shrugged.

"Hard to influence a mind you can't hear," Lex said reflectively.

"Yeah."

"But still possible?"

"Well, I guess. But I've only ever once felt like I had missing time where it felt like no time had passed at all, and that was a Kryptonian thing. And Kryptonian things tend to come with a lot more gloating, which I don't remember, so it's pretty unlikely."

"Hm." Lex thought for a bit longer. It stretched into minutes.

Lex straightened finally, and said, "Well, if someone followed you over to mess with you, we'll just have to deal with it."

Clark blinked up at him, because the thought hadn't even occurred to him. And then he blushed, because...

" 'We'?"

"Yes, Kal. _We._ " Lex gave him a look of fond amusement. "You're not thinking of cutting your elder brother out of the action now, are you?"

"Wouldn't dream of it," Clark said with a slight smile, standing up slowly. When he got his feet under him again, he felt a little better. More... solid?... somehow. "You'd probably just barrel in full steam ahead anyway if I tried to stop you. Best not to risk it."

"Damn straight. I'd run you right over," Lex said firmly, more of a promise than a threat.

Clark laughed lightly, then swayed slightly.

"Kal?"

Clark blinked and carefully grasped the nearest shelf for support. "It's... ok, I think. Still a little... dizzy?... I guess." He wasn't all that familiar with the feeling, so he wasn't all that sure. He breathed carefully and waited it out.

Lex gave him a look of concern, but Clark waved him off after only a few seconds or so. Whatever it was felt like it had pretty much passed.

As Lex wheeled over to the cash register, Clark took a second to push himself into super-speed standing-still, just to make sure he still could.

He still could.

As he walked over after Lex, he inobtrusively checked his strength by sliding a hand in his pocket and softly squeezing and rolling around a small metal ball bearing between his fingers -- he'd kept it after he found it, as a sort of security blanket; after all, what if the sunlight here was different? -- and, true to form as it had been every time he'd checked so far, his strength was still good, too.

The dizziness was still a little disturbing all on its own, though. It hadn't felt like Kryptonite at all -- not with the lack of pain -- and blue-K never felt like anything really, but...

Clark shook his head and came up to stand beside Lex at the cash register. He helped Lex transfer the pile up and onto the countertop that was situated well-over his head.

Clark chatted with the sales clerk amicably as she rang things up, and with a little effort drew Lex into the conversation as well.

By the time they left, the clerk was smiling, and so was Lex.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	7. Family History and Family Values

~*~*~*~*~*~

After they'd transferred Clark's newly-acquired clothes-stuffs to the back of the van, Lex decided that they needed ice cream. They ended up at the parlor on Fifth and West, and took their cones to a small play area -- not large enough to really be called a true _park_ \-- and found themselves a bench at the edge of the grass line, overlooking a swing-set and monkey bars and other various playground equipment, and, past that, the pavilion, the little-league sized sports fields, all the various winding sidewalks, and a small pond with only a few large trees spotting the edges.

Clark sighed as he settled down onto one end of the bench, with Lex right at his side in his wheelchair. Clark licked and munched and crunched through his own ice cream cone in short order, and then dropped his elbows behind the back of the bench and slid out his legs, leaning back with his head tilted up to the sky, just enjoying the feeling of cool breeze and warm light as he soaked in the sun. He enjoyed the feeling of being able to take long, slow, deep breaths, with nothing to listen for and no reason to have to be on guard. He let the sound of the delighted laughter of kids at play with their parents wash over him.

"You like the sun," Lex observed.

"Feels nice," Clark said, not opening his eyes or otherwise moving.

"Hm. I suppose it does," Lex said easily. Clark heard the quiet creak of tendons in his 'new' step-brother's neck as he tilted his own head back.

"I don't need sunscreen, though," Clark said, suppressing a smile.

"I don't burn easily."

"Really?" Clark said, turning his head slightly to the side and slitting his eyes open. "Huh."

God, Lex looked so good like that. Head tilted back, no worries etching lines into his face. Just... relaxed and at peace with the world.

It was so _nice_ to be able to sit here with Lex, worry- and stress-free, and simply... **be**.

Clark didn't want to leave.

Clark had to stop that thought where it was, but it was too late to not acknowledge the truth of it. It wasn't a bad place, here. There were no hordes of monsters here to fight -- the Kawatche Caves weren't where they should be, would be, so Kryptonians might not even _exist_ , here. And that meant that all those things that had been prompted by the destruction of Krypton -- up to and including Clark's arrival here, and the continuing fight that was the dark legacy of Jor-El and General Zod -- hadn't happened, and the things that had happened as a result -- like the breakout from the Phantom Zone, if it existed, and the premature arrival of Darkseid, if he and the New Gods existed, here -- hadn't happened, and probably wouldn't. Not for a long, long time. If ever.

It wasn't a bad place, no, not by a long shot. They didn't need a Superman, not like people did at home. And Lex... god, it was so easy here. Too easy, almost. Clark kept expecting things to go horribly wrong, but they just... didn't.

Lex made it so easy. Everything was so easy with him. Even the fights -- no-one had to win or lose, because there was nothing to risk, not really. There wasn't the threat of secrets uncovered or lost, not the way it was at home. And this Lex clearly _wasn't_ afraid of him, even though he had no reason not to be... though he was clearly afraid _for_ him, sometimes. But this Lex didn't want to use him. He didn't want to poke or prod him like a puzzle to be undone, unmade somehow, and maybe even remade into something he'd find more... acceptable. No, Lex liked him for who he was, even if he was still learning what that meant. But, he was also willing to wait to find out, as well. He didn't want to control him, either. He knew Clark was capable of making his own decisions, and while this Lex might not always like them, and seemed more than willing to express such feelings, both outright and _very clearly_... he didn't seem inclined to try and stop him if it came to that.

The lack of fear and the casual trust was kind of getting to Clark, right where he lived.

He frowned up at the sky as something else occurred to him. Something he suspected he wouldn't have thought of without Dr. Cohn's interference.

"Lex, do I... do I seem like a different person sometimes?"

"Hm?"

"Do I seem like a different person, or people, sometimes?" he repeated, turning his head to look at Lex full-on.

Lex looked surprised. "No, not really. Why?" He frowned slightly. "Has Dr. Cohn been trying to convince you that--"

"--I have multiple personality disorder? No, not really, but I borrowed a couple of his books to read for something to do, and there was some things about disassociation in them that..." Clark tried to think of how to best put it. "The way I separate things sometimes... I'm wondering if it might start... making memory problems for me."

Lex thought about that and nodded slightly. "It... makes sense in principle that you might try to segment off your experiences somewhat so that you wouldn't accidentally let something slip at the wrong time, to keep Superman and yourself--"

"And the reporter."

Lex frowned. "The reporter?"

"It's three personae, not two. There's the reporter at work, and Superman, and me."

Lex was quiet for awhile. "Kal, that's two masks and _you_ , not..."

Clark sat up a bit, turning towards him more fully. "They aren't just masks, Lex; they have to be... I had to make them personae. Masks crack. They're... brittle. And they don't cover enough. They don't hold up under scrutiny. I can't have people catching on, Lex, I..."

"All right," Lex said quietly. "Two personae."

"What?"

"Two personae. One person. _You_ aren't a persona."

"I... yeah, ok." Clark felt a little embarrassed. "Sorry, I just... back in high school, 'Clark Kent' was the geek who had to hide and not be himself. I spent a lot of time not feeling like me unless I was at home and only my family were around to notice or care."

"...You've always had to cover, at least a little, haven't you?" It wasn't really a question.

"Ever since I was old enough to understand that there were some things I just shouldn't do around other people, yeah." Clark shrugged.

"Hm." After a bit. "When do you get to be you?"

"Huh? Oh--" Clark paused, then had to rethink that. "Uh..."

"You don't know?" Deceptively quiet.

"No, I do, I just... Huh." Clark shook his head slightly. "You know, before all this? I would've said that 'I' was myself being Superman, but that's not really true, because I'm not like that when I'm rescuing people, not really. I'm trying to live up to their expectations, and there are some things I just wouldn't do as Superman when I've got the costume on, that I'd do if I was just hanging out relaxing by myself or with my friends who are already in-the-know. And up until I ended up here, I might've said that I was 'Superman' when I'm with the rest of the League outside of an in-progress mission or a fight. But..." Clark frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not really being 'Superman' then; I'm being myself, I think." And then Clark pulled a face. "And the reporter's another thing altogether."

"You have friends 'in-the-know'?" It was clear from Lex's tone that this was surprising information, considering some of their earlier talks a la Warrior Angel.

"Well, they're League members generally, but we're mostly all friends to differing degrees, too."

"Interesting," Lex said with a smile.

Clark cocked his head inquisitively.

"Oh, I'd worried a bit that you were a little too isolated with no-one to talk to. Declaring them friends... it makes more sense to me now that you said you trust them."

"Oh." Clark thought that one over for a bit. "What did you think they were? Before?"

"Colleagues."

"Oh." Clark bit his lip. Lex had made it sound the same way that Clark thought of his reporter-'friends' at work.

Not counting Lois, anyway.

Lois got her own classification, of course.

Just like Lex.

...Well, _any_ Lex, really, Clark was finding.

Even from each other.

"How much do you think you are separating out your experiences? Do you really think that might be why you 'misremembered' earlier?" Lex asked, frowning.

"I..." Clark wrinkled his brow. "...No," he said finally, sighing. "I don't think it explains that enough, but... I know I do classify some things as 'Superman' things, and some things as 'reporter' things. There's not a lot that goes in the 'both' box, these days. But... I've never had trouble remembering something overall, before today. It's more like a label. Some things do come to mind more quickly than others, but.. I'd always thought of that being a time-related thing. Like, the more recent things being easier to recall."

"I don't see you having issues, then, unless you start feeling emotionally disconnected from what's _happening_ when you're being 'the reporter' or 'Superman' or both."

"And if I was?"

"Then I'd say it was time for a vacation," Lex said matter-of-factly.

Clark thought about that a little, then smiled.

"Yeah, probably."

"Mmm. You know, Kal," Lex said as he stretched, "If you're that worried about the misremembering, we can always work through things together on that, too. I could probably work with you to help you try to mentally track things down. It's not like I don't have a lot of time on my hands, at the moment."

"Thanks," Clark said, and meant it.

"I could help, too, if you'd like."

Years of Smallville meteor-freak attacks had dulled Clark's startle reflex to the point that he didn't even twitch anymore.

...That didn't explain why Lex didn't so much as flinch, though. A history of past interactions with Lionel, however, might.

Clark and Lex turned as one to look up at Nell's smiling face.

Damn, he hadn't heard her walk up. How much had she--?

"When did you--?" Lex asked, probably thinking the same thing, but being a lot more blunt about it.

"About the time you said something about a vacation, Lex."

...And it was pretty obvious from her posture and tone of voice that she hadn't heard anything earlier, or otherwise potentially-damning. Lex and Clark both relaxed.

"Though I'm wondering why you're calling Clark 'Kal', Lex."

...Except maybe that.

"It makes things easier on me. Helps me differentiate. Clark, crazy. Kal, not so much," Clark smiled at her self-deprecatingly, hoping that it worked as well on her as it had on Lionel.

"Ah." Nell nodded, taking it in stride. "You might want to continue being careful about that around Jonathan, though. He might not understand."

Clark and Lex glanced at each other. It went unspoken that she was pretty quick, to have picked that up from a two-minute interaction and one random comment. Then they both nodded to her.

"Mind if I sit down?"

"Please," they chimed.

She did.

"Did you come back seeking us out?" Lex not-quite-blurted out, again.

Nell laughed. "Goodness, no! It's just a happy circumstance, I think, that you were here. No, I came to pick up Hiram from his playgroup."

She gestured at a group of kindergardeners clustered around the swingset, waiting for their next turns. One boy stood out a little from the rest, waving over at them and grinning up a storm.

Nell waved back with a smile, and watched as the young boy allowed himself to be tugged back by one of the other mothers, content that he'd been noticed by his mom.

"I hope he doesn't get teased too badly for being named after granddad," Clark remarked with a slight wince.

Nell laughed again, a relaxed, more natural one. "No, no -- his middle name is William, and he goes by Billy at school. We wouldn't do that to him," she said warmly. "I take it that you do remember some things correctly, then?"

Clark shrugged one shoulder. "It's probably safer to assume that if it's not something you or Lex have explicitly told me, that I don't know it." And given the differences between his memories of the Phantom's mental-maze and what had actually happened here, it didn't escape Clark that part of his overreaction earlier at the unexpected confrontation on the street might have been because he'd been working under an assumption of events that had been grossly untrue... even if he hadn't quite remembered it properly right at the time that it had been happenning.

"I see. Well, is there anything in particular that you would like to know about?"

"I guess..." Clark glanced back at Lex. "Anything about you, and Lana, and dad and me, before the accident?"

"Hm. All right, but I'll have to talk about the Luthors as part-and-parcel of that, as well," she warned.

Lex looked a little interested, but said, "Should I go...?"

"Oh, no, dear. You can stay if you like. I know Jonathan's being a bit unreasonable about it now, but if you two see yourself as brothers, I'm all for it," she smiled. "However, I draw the line at thinking of Lionel as any sort of relation to me and mine."

Lex laughed. "I can hardly disagree!"

Nell nodded her head slightly with a grim smile in a gesture of mutual understanding.

"Well, let's see," she mused. "I supposed it's easiest to start with your adoption, Clark."

Clark sat up a little straighter. So did Lex.

"Jonathan and Martha had been married for a few years, and they'd found out that Martha couldn't have children. Not easily, anyway. Jonathan had a bit of a low count, you see, and coupled with Martha's near-infertility..." Nell shook her head.

"They tried for years, but after a time, Lionel offered to help Martha adopt."

"Why?" asked Lex.

Nell looked at him. "Lillian and Martha had traveled in some of the same circles in Metropolis, back in the day. They knew each other, and he thought of that as an in. He was wanting to get in good with the Clarks -- her family."

"Her father's a good lawyer," Clark said.

"Yes." Nell nodded her approval. "They were estranged, but not that much. Not back then. However, it backfired a bit." Nell pursed her lips together. "William Clark was horribly offended that Martha had asked for outside help when the adoption agencies weren't approving them as a suitable household. He was of the opinion that she ought to have come to him, instead." Nell chuckled lowly. "It wasn't until later that we all found out the whole truth."

"Which was?" Lex asked breathlessly, on the edge of his seat.

Nell smiled. "That Martha had been declared an unsuitable candidate for adoption because she'd given up a baby of her own before."

Clark's eyes widened.

"...What?" Lex gasped.

Nell bit her lip, and Clark got the feeling that she enjoyed Lex's response to stories as much as Clark kind of had earlier. It _was_ a bit addictive, being the center of his attention like that, in kind of a good way.

"Mmhmm. It gets better." She looked up at Clark. "Well, in a way. You were the one she gave up for adoption."

"Huh?" Clark said startled.

Lex looked thunderstruck.

"We didn't find out until later -- well, Lana did, actually. Well after the divorce and remarriage, she heard a random remark from Lionel about you and 'filial duty' and she'd thought he'd meant himself." Nell shook her head. "Lana got a hair sample from you and ran it against Lionel. It wasn't a match. Neither was Jonathan -- she'd thought that maybe Lionel was getting even in some mean, petty way, keeping you away from your own father. But when she tried Martha..." she chuckled.

"They'd been married for six years by the time they adopted you. You can't have been older than five, and your birth certificate said you were three."

"She cheated on Jon?" Lex said, incredulous.

Nell nodded. "We don't know who your father is, Clark -- and believe me, it took some doing to keep Lana from running around and testing every last male of age in town to find out! But Martha must've known it wasn't Jon, and thought she'd be found out, or she wouldn't have done what she did."

"How did she hide the pregnancy from him?" Lex asked, curious.

"The birth records, while vague, list Clark as being small for his age, and almost a premature birth." Nell shrugged. "Sometimes women can look as though they aren't pregnant even when they are. I wouldn't have put it past her to have skipped meals or done other things hoping that it would force an abortion when she couldn't get one legally without Jon finding out." Nell looked angry at the last.

"As far as we've been able to determine, Lionel must have managed to talk the adoption agency she gave you up to to give up your information, and then persuaded whoever was taking care of you at the time to give you back."

"She adopted her own kid. God." Lex said weakly, sitting back.

Nell nodded. "And then realized that there were consequences to what she had done while pregnant with you," she said, looking at Clark. "I'm sorry to say this, but I think she knew that there was something... not quite right with you for some time. She started growing distant all-at-once, refusing to help out with you around the house. Jon and I... well, we talked quite a bit about the trials of adoption at the time. We leaned on each other a lot over the years."

"You raised Lana yourself?" Clark asked, wondering what was so different here about that, that had Lana calling Nell 'mom'.

Nell nodded. "Almost right before you were adopted, Lana's parents died. Laura and Lewis had been having issues; Laura had gotten pregnant with Lana by another man when she and Lewis had been separated a few years before. Lewis had just found out about the affair a few weeks before, and they'd asked me to look after Lana for awhile while they tried to work things out. So, she'd been staying with me." Nell sighed.

"It had been difficult, but they were getting through it, for her. But that weekend, god, they'd both showed up at the same time." She shook her head. "They were arguing in the street about which of them had her that weekend, and a drunk driver came by and..." She looked grim. "I didn't realize that Lana had wandered out onto the porch until I heard her scream. She saw everything."

"God..." Lex said. Clark agreed, feeling a little ill.

"It took a lot of therapy, but... she's better now. They never caught the man, but maybe that's for the best. I learned as much as I could about childhood trauma, and other things, and I tried to do what I could for her." She grimaced. "I have to admit, those first few years, I really resented her. I'd never wanted to stay in Smallville; I had been making plans on getting out. I saw her as a burden, not a joy. Not until Jonathan..." She took a deep breath in and out again.

"God, he was so patient with the both of you. When Martha stopped taking care of you, or started silently refusing to, Jon started bringing you over some days. He'd help out with the horses while I looked after you both; sometimes he'd take over watching you two when I had too much work to do with the flower shop." She got a little misty-eyed. "He hired extra hands at the farm, worked things out with some of the neighbors -- he really tried to make things work. But Martha got jealous of all the time we were spending together."

"Because you two were high school sweethearts," Clark said.

Nell looked surprised but nodded.

"Yes; that, too. But mostly because... well, I was jealous of her right back. We were practically raising the two of you as siblings as it was, and I unabashedly wanted him back." She sighed. "And I was _bitterly_ jealous at times, though I hate to say it. I tried not to take it out on either of you, but... lord knows." She sat back and looked a little ashamed of herself. Clark patted her on the knee consolingly, and she gave him a weak smile back.

"Well, I suppose none of us were angels or devils in all this," Nell said finally. "Well, except Jon."

"Devil, or angel?" Lex said with a wry grin.

Nell shook her head and laughed. "What do you think?"

"Hm. Hard to tell," Lex said, tapping a finger against his lips.

"He was most certainly an angel," Nell said graciously. "The very bulwark of strength. Right up until the accident and Martha leaving him, anyway. You have to understand, Clark," she said, almost pleadingly, "He'd been trying so hard with you, but he couldn't afford to have you seen by a specialist for help. Your paternal grandparents were no longer among the living, and he couldn't go to Martha's parents, either. Martha refused to let him receive any monetary help from William-the-elder at all, after the flaming row she had with him over the adoption."

"And we'd been trying to look out for you, truly. But... we just didn't know how bad it really was." She looked pained. "You'd started off with just getting a little too caught up your fantasy world sometimes, and when you were younger, we thought it was sort of a 'let's pretend' kind of game, and that you would grow out of it. Lana indulged you sometimes when you both got older, so we didn't think much of it at the time, but..." she shook her head. "Then we thought that you were simply... artistic, or something. Maybe looking for attention that you couldn't get from Martha. We encouraged you to write things down, but, looking back on it, well, that may have solidified your fantasy realm further."

"You were always quiet and generally unassuming in school, so the teachers didn't see anything wrong. And the way you usually put things... it almost sounded like a joke that we were all in on. Jon and I... we never thought to sit down with you sometime and make sure that you weren't really serious about it, as serious as you had been about it when you were so little."

"And, well, when compared to that poor Krupp boy, who went around building metal towers and getting into all sorts of trouble thinking he was an alien, we thought it wasn't nearly so bad with you."

"Until he ran out in front of my car," Lex said in a dark voice.

Nell's head shot up. "You could have run him down, but you didn't. I'm not sorry for that, and neither should you be!" she all-but-snapped at him.

Lex opened his mouth, to say what exactly Clark didn't know, but Nell overrode him, "Don't pretend to be an uncaring bastard like your father. Do you really think you would have been able to live with yourself, running down my mentally-disturbed son in the middle of the road?"

Clark stared.

Lex quieted.

"No, ma'am," Lex said finally, looking completely chastised and not meeting her gaze.

"I'm sorry that you were hurt, Alexander. I am so very sorry," she said, getting up and kneeling down in front of him. "But it wasn't Clark's fault. You must have realized by now that he didn't know what he was doing. If the blame rests with anyone, it is with me and Jonathan, for not doing something sooner."

"No... I..." Lex said quietly, looking away. "I'm... trying to deal with this, still. I'm slowly coming to terms with it. I..." He ran a shaking hand over his head. "It's no-one's fault. It happened. It just is. I..." He looked down at her. " _Please_ get up," he nearly begged.

Nell stood slowly and placed a hand over his. "Lex, I do worry about you both. I am happy to consider you a son, as Clark seems to consider you a brother. If you will let me."

"I... I don't know about that," Lex said, looking disquieted. Clark felt almost sad watching them.

"Well, I understand. I know it's probably a lot to take in all at once," Nell said. She took a breath, "And lord knows I don't want to cause problems for either of you with Martha, or Lionel," she frowned, and it was obvious that it had more to do with worrying about the consequences to them than anything to do with what Martha and Lionel might think about it. "But please understand -- you do have another place to turn to, if you need it. All right?"

They both nodded.

"Good," she said quietly, sounding satisfied. Then, in a louder voice, "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to retrieve your youngest brother from daycare," she said with a wink, and headed off across the grounds to do just that.

"Wow," said Clark.

" 'Wow', indeed," Lex agreed. "...Was she like that on your earth?"

"Uh, that would be a resounding 'hell, no'." Clark thought for a moment. "She reminds me more of my mom. ...Or _a_ mom. Not too many of the friends I had back then had moms, so it's kind of hard for me to compare." He'd never gotten to see Pwte's mom all that often -- she had always been very busy with her judicial proceedings, and Pete hadn't wanted to 'hang out with his _mom_ ', besides. Clark bit his lip. "I dunno, it seems weird. The Martha I know... mom never gave up on me, even -- no, _especially_ when it got obvious how different I was and how hard it would be to 'hide' things about me from everybody else. She never got... cold. She did the opposite."

"Well, feeling competent at raising an intelligent alien child who is capable of inhuman levels of self-restraint is a bit different than trying to raise a mentally-disturbed son whose parentage is dubious at best, and a constant reminder of an old affair at worst."

"Yeah, well, maybe, I guess. ...But I still think things are different a lot farther back than just the no-aliens stuff, and the first meteor shower." Clark was pretty sure _his_ mom had never had an affair, after all, and those missing Kawatche...

"First meteor shower?" Lex turned to him. "There was more than one?" Then he paused and added in a slightly-strangled tone, "Did the... other-- second?-- one hit town as well?"

"Yeah." At Lex's look, he added, "What can I say? Smallville."

Lex stared at him for a moment, then just shook his head.

" _Smallville_ ," he said in a tone of voice Clark was well familiar with from his Chloe and Lex, both.

Clark couldn't help but laugh. And then he found himself having to explain to an ever-curious Lex of his own.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	8. The Ides Come Marching Home, The Bells Call All To War

~*~*~*~*~*~

When Lex and Clark got back to the mansion, they left Clark's new clothes in the laundry room for the staff to wash and headed for the library, laughing together over a really bad astronomy joke.

But their joviality was cut short when they saw who awaited them there.

"Problem?" Lex asked Lionel and Dr. Cohn as he wheeled himself in and came to a stop next to Clark.

"You... you didn't show up for your appointment, K-Clark," he said, wringing his hands nervously.

Lex and Clark glanced at each other.

"I thought that Lex got that renegotiated to only once per--"

"You promised one session _daily!_ " Dr. Cohn shouted, looking even more nervous.

Clark, shocked, took an involuntary step back.

"I, uh..." He glanced between Lex and the head shrink. Lex was frowning like he was contemplating a puzzle he was missing a few pieces to, while holding a handful of others that refused to fit.

"Now, son," Lionel said, sounding all-reason, "I think you should go with the good doctor. You wouldn't want to put your conditions of release at risk, now would you?"

"He isn't," Lex said blandly, as Clark frowned at the use of 'son'.

"Oh, no?" said Lionel. "I don't believe that's what the documentation you signed says," he ended smugly, holding it out.

Lex frowned and wheeled himself over to Lionel. He reached up and took the papers from him, and as he glanced through it, he looked angrier and angrier by the second. "What did you _do_ , dad? This _isn't_ what I signed earlier!" He paged through a little further and his hand froze above one page and he paled. "What... what are you playing at here?" he asked quietly.

"Son, really, what are you implying? These are the documents on file," Lionel said easily, with amusement.

Clark frowned over at them, and wondered if he should X-ray the documents to see what was going on. He took a step forward--

And Dr. Cohn blocked his way. 

Clark stopped in place, blinking down at the man.

"K-Clark, come on, let's find another room, and we'll just--" Dr. Cohn said, moving towards him and raising a cautious hand towards his arm.

Clark took a step back, out of his immediate reach. Dr. Cohn looked more controlled than he had a moment ago, but Clark had a very bad feeling about all this...

Clark glanced over at Lex, who was sitting silently but looking like he was shaking with... rage? What had Lionel done? "What, right now?" he asked Dr. Cohn.

"Yes, no time like the present," Dr. Cohn said, moving towards him again.

Clark took another step back, frowning. Didn't the man hear what Lionel had said? Shouldn't he have been helping...? "Why? Why does it have to be right now?" he asked, getting a sneaking suspicion.

"Consistency is important--" Dr. Cohn said, moving towards him yet again, and Clark suddenly recognized this behavior. He was being corralled.

Clark immediately stopped retreating and caught Dr. Cohn's hand in a smooth motion, and then watched him pale.

"Bullshit," Clark spat back, not happy with the man. If something was wrong, why hadn't he come to him? "What's going on? What are you afraid of?" He glanced over at Lionel. "What did Lionel--"

" _The green tea-leaves in the garden fade in the gloom of night!_ " Dr. Cohn shrieked out.

"What--?" Clark blurted, staring at the doctor in confusion.

And then his vision unfocused slightly and his perception turned inward -- he felt a mental _click_ as something snapped free and unfolded inside his head.

He clenched his teeth and his eyes rolled up into his skull as everything went black around him. Nothing there. He shuddered.

He distantly felt his knees hit the hardwood floor and a voice -- Lex -- calling out to him, but he couldn't made it out.

Then... _**everything** faded out_.

_Oh, god. This isn't real._

He **remembered** this... _almost_... on the fringes of thought.

The caves. Stuck. Alone.

Jor-El picking him apart from the inside out.

Memories that he had always thought he didn't have anymore -- _hadn't the black Kryptonite gotten rid of it?!?_ \-- threatened to coalesce and he pushed back **hard**.

_No! I'm not here, this isn't real! The library. Lex. That's real. -- **Lex!**_

He fought and fought and twisted in a nonexistent wind, pushing all of his senses, trying to feel/see/hear/taste/smell/touch what was there, what had to still be there -- _refusing_ to let go of his sense of self, refusing to let anything _not-him_ take hold, until something finally _**tore**_.

He fell forward, gasping for breath, as the library snapped back into focus around him.

And then everything swam in front of his eyes.

His head hurt like hell.

Whatever Cohn had been trying to do hadn't worked, but it _had_ knocked something loose that he'd had locked down thought-tight with absolute denial and completely suppressed for _years_.

And _that_... --was something that could do far worse damage than anything these foolish humans could ever hope to bring to bear on him, an exalted son of Krypton--

_NO!_

He clutched his head in his hands, curled in on himself.

That was Jor-El talking. He _couldn't_. He wouldn't!

He brought himself down further, made low on the hard cold floor, and tried to sort through what had escaped that inky-black Pandora's box. He thoroughly destroyed anything Kal-El. Tried to save anything Clark-Kent from being irrevocably twisted.

He was aware of voices in the room with him, but he hadn't the time or ability to deal with them -- not now. Not with these **things** trying to take root inside him. Snatches of phrases made their way to the forefront of his conscious mind from time-to-time, but it wasn't all that important, not nearly so necessary of immediate action...

...not until he felt a pair of warm hands on him, and a shaky voice crying, "God, Kal! Please! _\--No! Don't!_ "

 _Damnit._ He mentally shoved and beat back and slammed things down, the worst of what still remained --which was a lot, too much. But still he tied them up with whatever he could, as best as he could, _knowing_ it wouldn't hold, but... that was going to have to wait -- it was all he could do for now.

He opened his eyes.

He felt more than saw Lex bent over him on the floor protectively, shaking, his wheelchair overturned a few feet away, between him and Lionel.

He slowly unfolded himself from his kneeling crouch over his legs, wrapping an arm up around Lex to hold him close, pulling Lex into his lap.

He saw a terrified Dr. Cohn standing, cringing away, several yards back.

He looked up further and saw Lionel standing there with a gun trained on him and Lex both.

He turned to Dr. Cohn, Kryptonian imperatives to rule, to dominate, to conquer still dancing behind his eyes and further corrupting in his sight the horrid, quivering little mouse of a man.

"You should have trusted me, doctor," Kal said coldly.

He drew Lex close, and they were gone.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	9. Patchwork Mind, Bleeding Soul

~*~*~*~*~*~

"Sorry, Lex. There wasn't time. Cohn did a number on me. I couldn't think clearly, and if I'd stayed there any longer..." Kal -- Clark -- shrugged. "I probably would've killed someone."

Then he blinked and grimaced, rubbing his forehead. Clark wasn't so cold, so easygoing about murder.

"Damn, sorry. I'm still doing it."

Clark paced back-and-forth in the small room.

"...Kal, under the circumstances, you don't sound--"

"It's not just the words or tone, it's the _thoughts_ behind them," Clark grimaced. "Clark is, is, _not_ someone who would want to hurt someone for discovering he's an alien, or being forced to tell, or even being afraid of him. He -- I -- would cut-and-run. Maybe be angry or hurt about it, but... Kal-El wouldn't give a damn about some stupid, insignificant humans, who _dared_ to attempt to control him. He'd burn them like living flames on a pyre to his glory and--" Clark clutched at his head, sat down on the edge of the bed, and breathed through clenched teeth as he curled inward, shuddering once.

"I'm. not. sure. where. the. lines. are. any. more." he told Lex, each word a separate sound and meaning unto itself.

Lex slid up next to him, and wrapped an arm around his back as Clark tried to regain a little more mental equilibrium.

"You're going to be all right," Lex said with conviction.

"Maybe," gritted out Clark.

"No, not maybe. I may not like that you sped us out of there right in front of Lionel--"

"-- _fucking controlling bastard, deserves to **die**_ \--" Kal hissed madly.

"--and confirming anything Cohn may have told him about you, but I trust your judgment," Lex ended, rubbing him lightly on the back, not sounding perturbed by his reactions in the least. "I _am_ more concerned about what Cohn did to you, and how."

"Hypnotism. Drugs. I think we were both under when we were swapped. Me and your Clark. I only half-remember the first," Clark said. "He was using the trance and drugs to bring Clark up and out. He expected me to stay under like Clark would, go deeper again, after he broke the trance. But I, I woke up when he was done. He managed to re-hypnotise me, put me back under, at least a little." He shook his head like a dog trying to shake off water. "Said something to one of the nurses about my brainwaves suddenly being different. Tried it all again. Asked me about... you. Asked me to tell him about what wasn't real. _Fuck,_ " he breathed, bringing his head up. "He _did_ do that to me. I didn't meet him for the first time in that padded cell in Belle Reeve, I..." He sucked in a breath, closed his eyes again.

"He told me to forget that. The Phantom-maze. He thought I was Clark, and..." a hysterical bubble of laughter worked its way out.

"He told me to forget, and I _did_ forget, most of it. Fuck. No wonder I was so confused when I woke up in that cell. And then he told me to forget the sessions, too, and..."

"But you remember now."

"Yes, but... it's all mixed up in everything else. I think he went for control, later. When he realized I wasn't Clark, after what happened in the... the outdoor recuperation area, I think he got scared, thought I was too screwed up in the head to let me be..." Clark shook his head again, let his hands fall between his legs as he stared down at the faded and well-worn carpet under his feet, trying to sort through the things _crawling_ through his mind.

"He tried to find something he could use inside my head as a control. An inhibitor. He was trying to put in a trigger. A fail-safe. He was desperate, and I think enough like a human that even machines can't tell... He thought, if he got the hypnotic technique down, just right, that maybe... maybe he really _could_... **fix**... me..."

Clark laughed slightly, staring at the faded paint on the patched-up wall in front of him. Better put together than he was, just then. "He said a lot during those sessions, once I was under, knowing it was safe to do that because he could make me forget. He got better at it, too. The hypnotism. What he could control. _Really_ quick." He hadn't even cared about being caged up like that, hadn't thought twice about doing what he was told; hadn't even thought about trying to leave. Hadn't thought after Lex when Lex wasn't right there visiting. Hadn't... hadn't thought much of anything beyond how he could get better after awhile, and 'getting better' had been 'doing what the doctors want'.

Clark shivered again, scared sick. "Too, too quick," he whispered. Didn't he have any mental defenses worth anything at all?

"Why didn't you notice the missing time?" Lex asked quietly.

"He told me not to. Not to think about it. Fill it in with something else if I had to. He didn't spend the whole time messing with me under, I think," Clark said, rubbing his forehead. "Maybe only thirty minutes or so out of each session's hour-and-a-half." Like that wasn't enough, too much already.

Lex sighed.

"He really picked the wrong thing to use, though -- unless he was _trying_ to make me go insane!" Clark said, laughing outright.

"Kal..." Lex whispered.

"Fuck, Lex, I--" Clark turned and wrapped his arms around Lex, pulled him back and down onto the mattress, and curling up beside him, into him. Hiding his face in Lex's stomach. "Jor-El, you don't _know_. He, he-- what he _did_ \--" Clark's voice broke and he shivered uncontrollably. "I wasn't _me_ anymore. I thought that was _gone_ , I--" Clark whimpered. It wasn't him. It shouldn't be him. It _couldn't_ be _him!_

"You're going to be all right, Clark."

Clark whimpered again, curling into Lex, and Lex stroked his hair.

"Shh. You're going to be all right."

~*~*~*~*~*~


	10. Clockwork Ills, RuNning oUt of TiMe...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex didn't know where they were.

Certainly, he knew that they were in a motel room somewhere. Quite probably in the United States, because he could see the emergency evacuation and occupancy card on the door from where he was lying on the bed, and it was written in American English.

He wasn't sure if the alien had broken the door to get them in, or... He really wasn't sure how the alien had gotten them in, but the door looked fully-closed and the handle-lock didn't seem broken.

He continued to stroke the alien 's hair, and he listened as the alien's breathing evened out, felt him slowly uncurl, slowly relax.

He took stock of the situation.

He was lying on a (somewhat soft, fairly clean) bed next to an alien, in a slightly-rundown motel room. Said alien was a crazy alien, though he was trying desperately not to be. Crazy.

Said alien had been _driven_ crazy by one Dr. Cohn of Belle Reeve. Said doctor had made said alien crazy, possibly without realizing it.

...And then the 'good' doctor had undoubtedly realized his mistake -- that he'd made a perfectly sane, rational individual **insane** by forcing them to undergo unnecessary medical procedures with far-reaching consequences. But once he had realized his mistake, had he attempted to undo the damage done, like any self-respecting physician with a conscience would do? Oh, no, not this one! Rather than face the reality and consequences of his actions like a man, _this_ so-called 'mind healer' had instead decided to 'fix everything' by _continuing to do exactly what he'd done before and make it **even worse**_. Because, _apparently_ , in the health profession, the ramifications of such despicable actions could be swept under the rug if one just _tried_ hard enough to cover things up -- who knew?

Well, Lex did, at least. He hadn't needed much up-close-and-personal experience to guess.

Said alien, sleeping fitfully beside him, had gross vulnerabilities that could be taken advantage of. Said alien susceptible to: the-meteor-rock-now-known-as-Kryptonite, magic, and telepathy. Oh, and apparently also hypnotism.

Lex wondered what else the alien had left out in terms of weaknesses.

Further, he wondered if Dr. Cohn had been... 'intelligent' enough to ask the alien to elaborate upon them while he'd had the alien under. Given his utter disregard for ethical conduct and his penchant for control -- literal _mindcontrol_ , apparently of the type that one usually only saw relegated to the most incredibly unrealistic of Hollywood movies involving sleeper agents -- Lex doubted he would put anything past the man.

If so, then it would be safe (hah!) to assume that his father knew of every last one of those weaknesses by now, and would be working to exploit them accordingly.

_...I wonder if I would be considered a weakness._

Lex grimaced and sat up slowly. The alien curled in on himself a little more, muttering unintelligibly, and Lex patted his head and stroked his hair until he settled again.

Lex breathed out a soft sigh and shook his head.

Lex wouldn't have minded calling him 'Clark' aloud one bit, but the alien had never really asked, merely insisted the once that Lex should address him otherwise, and Lex... had not known any better, and had not thought to ask.

It was a little disconcerting to discover that Clark had had Lex calling him by a name he associated with disaster, overwhelming mental pain, and madness, all of this time, rather than by a name which he considered his own.

It would explain the odd, passing cold glint Clark got in his eyes sometimes when Lex had said 'Kal', though -- mainly because that vague, unconscious glint was far more than a passing thing, now.

Lex hoped that Kal's madness wouldn't be here to stay, but if it was... well, he supposed he'd just have to make do with it. His presence would still be preferable to and far more welcome than the presence of several _other_ individuals he could name.

Lex looked around the motel room, really _looked_ , getting his bearings for the first time since Clark had spirited them away there. He moved forward to the edge of the bed and looked down at the floor.

...It seemed a bit farther away than he was comfortable with.

Glancing around, he suddenly realized that he didn't have his wheelchair with him. Clark hadn't brought it -- either had not thought to, or... had not thought to. Lex was not going to overthink that. The alien man had obviously been overwhelmed by the mental beating at the time, that was impacting him well after, still.

Actually, he didn't have any sort of ground transportation, as Clark had brought them to wherever they were... not that he could have driven them anywhere.

If he grabbed hold of the bedsheets, could he lower himself down carefully? Would he be able to pull himself back up?

He didn't like the idea of crawling around on the ground.

Lex realized that he was disturbingly non-mobile.

Worse, he had no idea of how to change that without depending on other people... like he usually did.

...Lex was starting to realize why Clark had seemed extremely off-put on several notable occasions.

Then Lex realized he didn't have his wallet, either -- he'd tossed it on the table in the hallway as he and Clark had headed for the library... god, what -- ten, maybe twenty minutes ago, now?

And without money, well, how could he even afford other people's help? Or anything else?

\--And it would have to be a lot of money, because he'd have to pay for silence as part-and-parcel of that, as well.

Because that fake paperwork that Lionel had showed him hadn't just been on Clark -- there'd been a stack in there on him, too.

The paperwork he'd read had said that he'd been certified as mentally unstable. A ward of his father. Unfit for employment, and only 'released' to outpatient care at the mansion because every last one of the staff were trained medical professionals. All there in black and white.

The worst part was, Lex didn't know if it was true or not.

He'd had that one abysmally low period, of course. The one that had convinced him to stay the hell away from thoughts of the accident, or one Clark Kent.

He'd gone to see 'his Clark' at Belle Reeve once, early-on, after all of the surgeries, too too soon after he'd been informed, found out -- they had to have been keeping it from him, like he was some kind of fragile _child_ \-- finally _been told_ that he would never walk again. And he hadn't been able to handle the surety the boy had had that he'd 'saved' Lex from something horrible, rather than the reverse.

What came come after... had been an accident; he'd been too depressed to constrain his drinking like he was usually capable of. He'd drunk in excess and then failed to stop; he'd been far too drunk to be thinking clearly. He hadn't been able to remember how many of the sleeping pills he'd had, and he'd just been _hurting_ so _badly_ still -- he'd honestly thought that he hadn't, _couldn't_ have taken _any_ of them, that he'd merely _imagined_ doing so. How else could he still have been awake?

He'd gotten himself to bed somehow after that, though he couldn't recall how. Despite staff reports to the contrary, and it being unthinkable that someone had been thoughtful enough to do so, he supposedly had been asleep for hours and barely breathing by the time one of his staff had ventured into his rooms to check up on him... and then ran off to call for help. But he couldn't remember anyone having woken him, nor had he remembered having slept for any appreciable length of time, nor could he remember the pain having lessened at all in the interim of his supine and restless rest.

And this was why he'd thought he hadn't really fallen asleep. This was why he had dragged himself back into the bathroom and, in depseration, had tried taking a few more pills with a generous helping of scotch -- to knock himself out for a few short hours, when he'd thought nothing else would work. He barely remembered what had happened next, just that he'd been trying to shove the pill bottle back up onto the sink counter and suddenly felt dizzy and then cold, but apparently he'd been found collapsed in a pool of his own blood on the bathroom floor. He hadn't been trying to cut his wrists with shards from the decanter, and he hadn't been trying to overdose on the medication in the hopes of never waking up again.

When he had been awake and coherent enough again, able to understand enough to be confused as to what was going on, he'd tried to explain all of this, of course ...but no-one had believed him. They'd sent him to Belle Reeve.

And with Clark -- _his_ Clark -- in the nearby vicinity -- and Lex had known _exactly_ how many rooms away he'd been, because he had recognized the floor -- after everything else that had happened, Lex had nearly begun to doubt his own sanity from it all. He'd started to wonder if maybe _they_ were right, and that _he_...

\--But no. He was _not_ suicidal, and never had been, not in the least! He knew this. He knew this implicitly. He knew his own mind _very_ well, now. Faced with cold, dispassionate and uncaring 'professionals' in whom he could place no trust -- because they did not listen to him when he talked, or believe him when they did -- he had been forced to turn to and rely upon the only person left that he _could_ trust: himself. And then he had educated himself. Never again would he let someone do to him what they almost had -- twist his thoughts and mind and being to someone else's perception, rather than his own.

...But that had come after, well after. He'd been institutionalized for a week, then out again. Mostly it had just been time to physically heal enough that the larger bandages could come off of his hands and arms. He'd signed himself out, wheeled himself out on his own... and been surprised to find Lionel waiting for him. No-one had said anything to the contrary of him being under his own reconnaissance, before or since, rather than his being out solely on the basis of Lionel's whims and fancy.

What a cruel joke it would be if it were true!

It might as well have been, though. Until Clark -- this Clark -- had come, he hadn't left the mansion in...

...And when he had left the mansion, he had never done so without at least one of the house staff with him at all times. Not until Clark had come home that day. He might as well have been baby-sat and spoon-fed by them like a child all those years.

He'd been utterly mortified to find that he'd known the stores and shops in the town less-well than even his visitor-from-another-reality, though he hoped it hadn't been terribly evident -- he'd have been mortified if he'd shown such an obvious and inexcusable lack.

But... it had been fun. That single afternoon out of the town had been... nice. He didn't know whether Clark's presence had somehow mitigated the stares and the jeers of the townsfolk, or if he'd simply been too distracted by Clark to be overly sensitive to what might have been merely a possibly-faulty perception of wholly-imagined slights.

Perhaps... both?

Regardless, he was distressingly dependent upon Clark now, and Clark was not in good shape.

Lex couldn't even risk leaving the room to see what he might accomplish, in case they were in a place near the mansion and someone spotted and recognized them. Lex wouldn't put it past Lionel to have alerted the police to their 'escape' and have had half the state already out in force, searching desperately for his 'confused and dangerous' pair of certified-insane sons.

But surely he could do something? Gather information, maybe call--

He pulled out his cellphone and flipped it open, reaching out long fingers to dial... then froze and stared at the keypad for a long while in another of many shocked realizations.

He couldn't even call for help because, really, who could help them? The Kents?

...Even if they could and would, Lex didn't know their phone number.

The fact of the matter was, he and Clark simply didn't _have_ anyone else. Anyone Lex knew, he had lost touch with after the accident, not that any of them would have cared enough to have been any help to him, if he had. And anyone Clark knew? Why, they were in a completely separate reality, and most likely couldn't get here to help! --Even if they knew where he was, they undoubtedly didn't know how to get here or they would have 'rescued' him by now... and how would they have even known that something had gone horribly wrong with him?

That cheery thought aside, all Lex could capably do at the moment was close his cellphone again, remove the battery, and pray that his wireless company didn't give up its last known GPS signal location ping to his father before Clark woke from his restless slumber and got them both the hell out of here.

Wherever here was.

~*~*~*~*~*~


End file.
